Long Weekend
by hoshi-mon
Summary: Lt. Yancy didn't remember being on a mission, but she and Dr. Jackson were prisoners on a strange planet, and the rest of SG-1 nowhere to be seen. Early Season 7. Rated T for a few cuss words, light romance and slightly suggestive description.
1. Chapter 1: Discovery

**Long Weekend**

Cold. Dark. Pain in head and wrists and shoulders and leg.

Second Lieutenant Pat Yancy lifted her head and blinked. Light leaked into the room from somewhere, and she could make out the vague outline of a companion to her right, also shackled to the wall by the wrists.

She took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it. The stench in the room was appalling, and her head throbbed worse with the onslaught of the smell. She closed her eyes, trying to breathe more shallowly.

Her next thought was that old cliché, _Where am I?_ She tried to think what she'd been doing, what mission they'd been on. But the last thing she remembered was falling into bed, exhausted, in a room at Stargate Command. The throbbing headache didn't make the effort of thinking any easier.

The pain in her shoulders and wrists started to rival that in her head, and when she shifted her weight to take some pressure off her arms--bound above her head to the wall--she realized that she'd hurt her left leg somehow, somewhen. Agony shot through her knee, and when she reeled aside to take her weight off that leg, she wrenched her shoulders still further.

At her involuntary gasp of pain, a feeble voice said, "Who's that?"

She closed her eyes and stayed completely still, trying to lull the pain in mind and body. She knew that voice, even when it spoke but two faint words. The other prisoner was Dr. Daniel Jackson.

Pat opened her eyes and turned her head. The light, coming from somewhere above, strengthened slightly, and she could discern the outline of Dr. Jackson's face. He hung limp from his shackles, his features unclear in the half-light.

"It's Pat--Lieutenant Yancy," she croaked. Her throat felt raw, abused.

"What? Wh-ere?" His voice was weak, and broke in the middle of the second word.

"Don't know."

He turned his head toward her, and she drew her breath in sharply. A fresh burn disfigured his left cheek. In the now considerably strengthened light, she could see that the edges of the burn were inflamed, and a clear fluid leaked from it.

She gulped and closed her eyes, nausea warring with wrenching horror in her gut. "What happened?" she whispered when she'd regained control of herself.

"Staff weapon?" It was a question, in that same thready, broken voice.

"Looks like it." He looked like he was in even worse shape than she felt. So she was the one who had to do something. Nobody else from SG-1 was here to help Dr. Jackson, just Pat Yancy, one of Stargate Command's newest personnel. How had they got here? Where was the rest of SG-1?

"Look, Dr. Jackson, I'll try to get free and help you. I've got first aid stuff in my pockets. . . ." She didn't even know if she was wearing her uniform, with its pockets well stocked with survival gear. She looked down, and was relieved to see woodland camouflage BDUs, a flak vest, and combat boots. Whatever had happened--and she still couldn't remember anything past falling asleep after a long day of making sure all the rifles in the SGC armory were in good working order--it had happened while they were equipped for a mission.

Dr. Jackson didn't answer, and Pat looked over to see that he hung limp, eyes closed. She caught her lip between her teeth. _It'll be okay. I've got antibiotics and everything here. He'll be fine._

Ignoring the pain in her leg, she put her weight on her feet and stretched to get slack in the bonds around her wrists. "It had better be rope," she muttered under her breath. She didn't have any idea how she'd get out of metal shackles. Craning her neck and looking back and above her head, she squinted in the diffuse light. She couldn't feel anything but pain in her wrists--she'd been hanging there too long. Her bonds didn't look like chain and metal, though. Yes, rope, tied to rings pounded into the rough log walls. Sunlight coming between cracks in the walls now illuminated the bloodstained cords.

Pat gulped. The stench of the straw on the floor, combined with the sight of fresh blood--her blood--glistening on the ropes, made nausea rise in her throat again.

Something rustled in the straw, and Pat closed her eyes. _Rats, of course_, she thought. That would complete the melodrama of being hung from her wrists in a noisome dungeon. _Do they even have rats on this planet?_ she wondered. Of course since she had no idea what planet she was on, she couldn't know that. A bubble of hysterical laughter rose in her throat, and she choked it down as she had the nausea. "In a cheap fantasy novel, the rats would smell the blood, climb the walls to get at it, and accidentally chew through the rope while they were trying to snack on my blood," she muttered.

A weak chuckle to her right told her Dr. Jackson had heard her. A wave of love and concern for him flooded through her, so strong that she gasped at its intensity. She took her bottom lip between her teeth, thinking, _I'm losing it from the pain._ She'd only worked with SG-1 on one mission. She hadn't been around them enough to become very friendly, or even call any of them by their given names--not that she would with her superior officers. She looked over at Dr. Jackson. His eyes were open again, and when he met her gaze his mouth firmed into a "we'll get through this" expression.

At a rustle from the floor he turned his head to look, and she had to glance away from the sight of the oozing burn on his cheek. "Got it in one," he whispered as a rat poked its head out of the filthy straw. It sat up on its haunches; the light was strong enough now that she could make out the creature's whiskers quivering as it sniffed.

The rat dropped back into the straw, which rustled as the creature ran through it to the wall. The walls, rough with bark left on the logs, were easy for the rat to climb. Pat had to swallow another fit of hysterical laughter as it began to gnaw at the blood-soaked rope at her right wrist. _Good thing I don't mind rats,_ she thought, trying not to move even when its whiskers brushed her hand and its teeth scraped along raw flesh.

More rustling in the straw, and more rat heads appeared out of the filthy straw like swimmers coming up for air. Pat held perfectly still, every muscle screaming with tension, as they ran up the wall and joined the first.

To take her attention from rats gnawing at her wrists, she surveyed the room. Sunlight streaming between the logs of the walls illuminated a fairly large room, roughly square, with a heavy rough-hewn door in the wall opposite where she and Dr. Jackson hung. The hinges looked like standard hardware store types. If she had any of her usual tools still in her pockets, it should be easy to unscrew those hinges and get out of here. Other than the straw on the floor, the room was completely empty. A shed of some sort--maybe a stable, from the odor?

Pat winced as a sharp pain shot through her right wrist, but then she realized that her hand was free, and she dropped it away from the rats gnawing the rope with a shudder of relief. Moments later her left hand, too, was free. She sagged against the wall, pressing her bleeding wrists hard against her right thigh to stop the throbbing.

She pushed herself away from the wall, careful not to put any weight on her wounded left leg. Startled by her movement, the rats disappeared down the wall and into the straw on the floor.

Her belt knife's sheath was empty, but the multi-tool in her pants pocket had a knife blade. In moments, she'd staggered over to Dr. Jackson, cut his bonds, and eased him to the floor. When she disturbed the straw, it stank more than ever, but Pat was past caring. She lowered herself down beside the archaeologist and dug through her uniform pockets for the packets of antibiotics and antiseptic wipes.

"Are you hurt anyplace else?" she asked as she dabbed gingerly at the edges of the wound on Dr. Jackson's face.

He drew in his breath sharply when the alcohol touched the raw burn, but answered in a steady, if weak, voice. "Don't think so. My arms and back ache enough that it's hard to tell."

"Yeah, me too." She searched her memory for the buddy care lectures on burn treatment she'd sat through so many times. "I don't think I'm supposed to bandage a burn, but I'm going to put antibiotic ointment on the edges where it's all inflamed looking."

"Okay." He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as she spread ointment around the edges of the burn. For good measure, she wiped his wrists, where the ropes had rubbed them raw, with the antiseptic. "Hey, warn me!" he whispered shakily.

"Sorry. I'm putting antibiotic on your wrists, too, and then I'll bandage them."

When she had finished tying gauze pads over the worst of the raw places on Dr. Jackson's wrists, she leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. She was starting to get dizzy with pain and stress, and she didn't want to pass out.

"Pat?" Dr. Jackson's voice sounded stronger. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Give me a minute." _He called me __Pat_, she thought.

Straw rustled, and then she felt Dr. Jackson's warm presence beside her. "I'll do your wrists. This'll sting." The sound of packets tearing open, then the sting of alcohol on the open wounds on her wrists. "I think your rats nibbled more than just the ropes. Your wrists look like hamburger--sorry, hardly the thing to tell you."

"Not _my_ rats," she said, fighting off blackness that threatened to overwhelm her.

The sound Dr. Jackson made was almost a laugh. She opened her eyes to see him staring intently at her. With the burned side of his face away from her, he looked almost normal. His mouth quirked as he looked at her. "Aren't we the pair?" He sank down beside her, his shoulder against hers.

To keep herself from sinking into darkness, Pat said, "We can probably take that door off its hinges. I've still got my multi-tool, and it has a good screwdriver in it."

"Shouldn't we wait until dark?"

"If someone comes to check on us, I don't think we're in any shape to overpower them and get away. Better to do it now, I think. I don't hear anything outside." She hadn't thought about that until she said it. In fact, she'd heard nothing but Dr. Jackson and the rustling of straw since she'd first awakened.

"Sounds good."

"Oh, another problem," Pat said. "I've hurt my leg."

Beside her, Dr. Jackson pushed himself up and knelt beside her. "Which one?"

"Left."

"I don't see any blood on the left--but there is some on the right."

"That's from my wrists."

Dr. Jackson ran his hands down her left leg. "Tell me where it hurts."

"Mostly the knee. Maybe I wrenched it. Ouch, yes, that's it."

"I don't want to cut your pants leg--who knows when we'll get more clothing. Here, lie down and I'll check it out." He undid her belt and eased her pants down.

She was in too much pain to protest. She gasped--more at the feel of those long, sensitive fingers running down the skin of her leg than the pain of her wounds.

"You've got a bruise roughly the size of Texas on your hip, and your knee's pretty swollen," Dr. Jackson reported. He helped her get her pants back up, and as she buckled her belt once more he said, "I should have a bandana in my back pocket. Yeah, here it is."

"Is there anything here to use for a splint--something to keep my knee immobilized?" Pat asked.

"A couple of pens in my pocket--but I don't think they're long enough. Maybe if I just tie my tee shirt around it?"

"Keep it on for now. It's still pretty cold in here. Just tie the bandana around my knee."

Daniel tried several ways of tying the bandana before he was satisfied that it might help keep her knee straight while not cutting off circulation. "Okay, now those hinges." He staggered to his feet, then reached down to help her up. By grasping the wall, she managed to stand.

They made it across the room, and she put her ear to the door to determine if she could hear anything outside. A faint, steady drone, but no talking or anything that sounded like people or vehicles.

"Can you hear that hum, or is it just my ears ringing?" she asked Dr. Jackson.

He put the good side of his head to the door, frowning in concentration. "Sounds like a generator."

"Right. Okay, so is this Earth, or another planet? I don't remember being on a mission. . . ."

Dr. Jackson's brow wrinkled as he thought. "Neither do I. I was studying those symbols we photographed on P3R-118--got so that my eyes were crossing, and I was making more errors than good guesses. I stayed on base to sleep."

"I was working late and stayed at the SGC, too. So how'd we get here--wherever here is?"

"I have no idea." Dr. Jackson stared at the filthy straw, plainly thinking.

Trying to figure this out hurt her head, so Pat instead turned her attention to the hinges. "Look! Even if we're on another planet, these hinges are from Earth. See the brand name? Stanley. And the screws are standard Phillips." She pulled the Phillips screwdriver head out of her multi-tool and started loosening screws. Putting pressure on the screwdriver made her already abused arms and shoulders blaze with pain, but she stuck with it doggedly.

She had two of the three hinges detached when Dr. Jackson said, "Here," and handed her an energy bar. "Rather hard on the throat, if yours is as dry as mine, but I'm sure you can use the boost."

"I'm glad you've got munchies in your pocket," she said, chewing carefully and wishing she had water.

"They've come in handy more than once." At the tone of his voice she glanced over at him, to see a still, bleak look on his face. Even she, one of the newest personnel at the SGC, knew the story of how he'd won his wife--and how she had died.

She choked down the last bite of the energy bar and tackled the third hinge. When she'd added its screws to the others she'd tucked into a pocket of her BDUs, she braced her body against the wall, got a rather awkward grip on the door, and pulled it toward her.

"Here, let me help." Dr. Jackson gripped one of the rough cross braces and heaved. The lock groaned and bent, and the door came rather abruptly open a good two feet. Sunlight streamed in, and she squinted, head pounding. Despite the sun, she shivered in the cold air coming in.

Dr. Jackson peered through the opening. "Nobody around that I can see--the place looks deserted," he said. "More crude log buildings, a few tents, muddy road, and lots of trees. I'd say a camp built by somebody from Earth. The tents look military. There've been vehicles on the road--probably trucks or jeeps, but I don't see any."

"Too bad. If we could get a truck--"

"We'd go where? We don't even know where we are, much less where we want to go."

"The Stargate?"

"Always assuming we're on a planet with a Stargate."

"There is that." Pat looked around. Except for the blood-stained ropes that had bound them, they'd left no indication of how they'd escaped. She had stowed the empty packets from the medication in one of her leg pockets, and now she added the wrappers from the energy bars. "Well, let's get out of here. I guess we can make a plan on the go."

She had to admire how smoothly Dr. Jackson eased around the doorframe, sweeping the landscape with his gaze. He'd certainly had enough practice checking out potentially dangerous situations. She, the newcomer at the SGC, hadn't been on enough missions to have that calm assurance. It still made her nervous just carrying a gun--not that she had one right now.

Still no one in sight. Whoever had tied them up in the shed had left them there without a guard. She edged around the doorframe after Dr. Jackson and surveyed the area, heart pounding. There was a long one-story building a couple of hundred feet away, straight across the road. Further on, to her right, another small log shed. Since the noise came from that direction, Pat guessed it housed the generator. The tents Dr. Jackson had mentioned were clustered at the other end of the long building, to her left.

"If there are trucks, they'll be back there." Dr. Jackson pointed to the right, where the rutted, muddy road disappeared out of sight behind the generator shed.

Pat tried to step away from the wall of the shed and her bad knee gave out, despite the bandana tied around it. Dr. Jackson caught her before she could fall. "Can't walk on it?" he asked.

She shook her head, nausea rising again at the pain that shot from knee to hip.

"Then there had better be a truck back there." Daniel's lips firmed in determination, then he winced as the expression pulled his burned cheek. He pulled her arm over his shoulders and helped her limp around the side of the shed. "I'll get you out of sight of anybody coming in on the road, then go reconnoiter."

He eased her down on the far side of the shed onto frost-covered gray-green grass. The trees in the forest were the wrong shapes and colors, and there was an orangish cast to the sky. Definitely another planet. "Be careful," she whispered. He gave a curt nod of his head, then winced again. With a quick survey of the area, he sped across the road and behind the long building.

Pat licked her cracked lips and wished for water. There should be a stream somewhere out in that forest. If Dr. Jackson didn't find a truck they could steal, they'd have to hide in the forest until her leg healed enough that they could travel--and until they could figure out what was going on. She wondered if the vegetation here was edible by humans. Most planets that had Stargates seemed to have _some_ plants that wouldn't poison people if they ate them.

At the thought of food, another wave of nausea passed through her gut. She clutched both hands over her belly, and was taken aback by the very obvious bulge. No wonder it had been so difficult to get her pants off and on. When had she gained so much weight? She pressed her hands to her belly again, feeling the flutter of movement under the skin. No, not fat. Pregnant.

She knew she was not pregnant--or had not been when she went to bed, last thing she remembered. Did her lack of memory hide the horror of rape and captivity? Somehow, she couldn't--or didn't want to--believe that.

This was crazy. Crazy as waking up fairly certain she was chained to a cold, slimy concrete wall, only to find that she was tied with ropes to logs. Crazy as rats that appeared when she thought of them--no, when she _mentioned_ them. She'd said something about rope, too, hadn't she? She cudgeled her aching head into yielding the memory of what she'd done in that stinking shed. Yes, she'd mentioned ropes. And she'd also _stated_ that she had first aid supplies. Until then, she hadn't even thought of what she'd been wearing, but then she'd known it was her familiar BDUs and flak vest, pockets stuffed with survival gear.

She let out a deep breath. She couldn't remember anything past falling asleep at the SGC after a long day in the armory. Maybe this was some crazy, ultra-real dream? But since when could she influence her own dreams? Dreams were pretty slippery that way. Usually whatever she wanted to happen, especially if it was good or helpful, was just beyond her reach.

Besides that, when had a dream ever included pain like that which had just shot through her leg? Wasn't the cliché that the pain of pinching oneself would wake one up? Then that step down on her bad knee should have had her sitting straight upright in bed, gasping.

So, not a dream. Some kind of drugged hallucination? But it seemed far too real, too connected for that. Virtual reality? She remembered one of SG-1's mission reports. Some crazy guy had kept his people entertained with virtual reality for centuries, only letting them back out to real life when SG-1 had been trapped in their VR equipment but then refused to "play." Dr. Jackson and Major Carter had discussed it once over lunch, how he'd relived his parents' deaths over and over again, trying every time to change the circumstances, but without success. That had seemed real, too. He could feel things, see them, taste and smell them. There had been no easy way to tell that he wasn't living real life.

So if this was some remarkably detailed virtual reality, what was the point? Was something feeding off her pain and fear? But then why let Dr. Jackson and her get away so easily? Why let that absolutely silly ploy of having the rats gnaw through the ropes work?

She heard a rustle in the grass and froze, pushing herself back against the rough logs of the shed. "Pat," came Dr. Jackson's unvoiced call. She turned to see him crouching against the wall at the far corner of the shed. "There are three jeeps and a truck parked on past the generator shed. They've all got keys in the ignition. We just need to figure out which one has the most gas in the tank, and get out of here."

"I think I've--" she began as he helped her up, pulling her left arm across his shoulders again. But then she choked up, unable to speak, to breathe. She coughed, trying to keep it quiet while she cleared her throat. Moments later she was gasping in air while Dr. Jackson thumped her back. She tried to speak again, to tell him what she'd figured out, and again her throat closed up and she choked until spots swam before her eyes and the blood pounded in her ears. Finally, bent double with Dr. Jackson supporting her, she was able to take a breath. She gasped in the cold, forest-scented air and knew that whatever was making them live this nightmare would not let her tell Dr. Jackson what she'd guessed.


	2. Chapter 2: Escape?

Pat's hands curled into fists as Dr. Jackson helped her to a sitting position. _I can't tell him what I've discovered! Now what should I do?_

"I'll find you some water," he said, the look of concern on his burned face wrenching her heart.

"I'm okay," she gasped. She almost said _maybe I'm allergic to something on this planet_ but stopped herself just in time. If things she said influenced what happened to them, saying something like that would mean she'd spend the entire rest of her time here trying not to go into anaphylactic shock. She had Benadryl in her pocket, but wasn't sure how well it would work if whoever had done this decided it would be fun to have her flirting with death by asphyxiation.

Instead, she said deliberately, "If that big building is headquarters for whoever kidnapped us, there should be a map of the planet there. We can find where the Stargate is so we're not just driving around blind."

"The road must lead to the Stargate. It ends back there where all the jeeps are parked."

"We can get an idea of how far away the Stargate is. And pick up some food and water, and find something to use for a splint for my knee." It was important she state all her wants clearly and unambiguously--and equally important that she not voice her doubts, or speculate on what kind of nasty things could happen to them. Don't give whoever was watching them ideas.

"Good idea."

He helped her across the muddy road as quickly as they could move. Pat hoped he wouldn't say something about whoever had kidnapped them coming back. If their spoken words created their reality. . . .

"There are a couple of windows and a door on the end of the building farthest from the generator shed," said Dr. Jackson, once they were behind the longest building.

"They won't lock the building if they're not expecting anyone else to be here," stated Pat.

Dr. Jackson gave her an odd look. "_We're_ here."

"They brought us here--and we were locked up."

"Maybe--"

She cut him off. She didn't want his conjectures creating problems for them.

"Just check?"

He wrinkled his nose at her, winced when it pulled the burn on his cheek, and nodded. He left her propped up against the side of the building and ghosted off around it. She called softly, "Look for weapons! Zats would be good."

It wasn't long until he was back, carrying a bulging plastic grocery bag. "Well, that was easy," he whispered. "Unlocked, like you guessed. Map just sitting on the desk there, and a refrigerator and cupboards behind the desk. No weapons, though."

No weapons? She supposed her statement could have been ambiguous enough to mean he didn't find weapons. Or maybe whoever was running this scenario didn't want them to have weapons. No matter. She'd think of something.

Dr. Jackson pulled a water bottle--Evian--out of the plastic bag. "Here, drink up. I stuffed all I could fit into the sack."

The water was cold--he must have liberated this from stocks in the refrigerator. She closed her eyes and relished the cool wash down her abused throat. "Aah, that's good. Nothing like cold water."

He hunkered down beside her, emptying another bottle of water in a few gulps. "We need to get out of here before people come back," he said. "It occurs to me that if there's no one here, they're probably at the Stargate--or on their way back to this camp from there. In that case, just taking a jeep and driving along that road is probably a bad idea--we'll meet them coming back. But you can't walk. So we need to go overland."

"Get a jeep with good tires, then," she said.

He grinned, then winced as it pulled his burned cheek. "I keep forgetting about that burn," he said.

"So it's getting better," she stated. "The antibiotic you took is working, and the painkillers."

He nodded absently. "Come on with me, then. No point in leaving you here while I scout out a good jeep." He helped her up and pulled her arm around his neck again.

"Did you get something for a splint for my leg?" she asked.

He grimaced. "Forgot that. There should be something we can use in the jeep."

_Good way to put that_, Pat thought. _Has he caught on to what's going on?_

"We'd better hurry," he said, practically dragging her through the wiry grass. "They could be back at any time."

_I guess he hasn't figured it out_, she thought. _He'd never have given __them__ that idea if he knew his words shaped our reality_. She listened hard for the sound of engines, but heard only wind sighing through the trees in the surrounding forest and occasionally rustling the taller grasses. So far, so good.

"Here," panted Dr. Jackson. They came around the generator shed and she could see the vehicles. They were rather battered, rusty and muddy, but welcome. Dr. Jackson pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and peered from one to the next. "That one, I think." He jerked his head at the furthest jeep. "The tires on those other two are practically bald."

He helped her up onto the jeep's cold, cracked upholstery, handed her the bag of supplies, and ran around to slide into the driver's seat. "Seat belt," he said tersely. "This will probably be a rough ride."

Pat wished she'd thought to specify that they'd find a trail through the forest. Now they probably _would_ have a rough ride. "There's not much underbrush in the forest," she stated. "That should make it easier." Maybe that would ameliorate what he'd said.

A quick nod, a wince as he pulled the burn again. Dr. Jackson was just reaching for the key to start the engine when Pat heard it. "Shh. Listen." _Crap_.

"An engine. We'll have company soon. Hope they don't hear me start the jeep up over their engine noise--we'll get a better head start."

She would definitely hope.

Dr. Jackson turned the key. The motor revved for a few moments without starting. He touched the gas pedal. When that didn't help, he switched off the engine. "Damn."

"Try again. It's cold out here."

He pursed his lips, turned to look at the road, then tried again. The engine caught on the first try and purred into life. Dr. Jackson let out a pent-up breath and released the parking brake. "Good thing I got plenty of practice driving cranky jeeps while I was out on digs," he breathed as he shifted into first gear. The engine faltered, and he eased up on the gas. "Come on, girl. Let's get going," he cajoled the jeep. They bumped forward over the rutted, frozen mud of the road, heading for the forest.

"There's a good enough gap between those two trees, ahead and to the right." It proved to be wide enough for the jeep--something Pat thought she'd assured by stating it was so. "Good thing it's cold, and this grass is springy. We won't leave tire tracks--it'll be harder for them to figure out where we've gone."

Dr. Jackson didn't answer. He was too busy driving the jeep as fast as possible over uneven ground through a forest. Branches scraped the jeep's sides, and Dr. Jackson, face tense with concentration, jerked the wheel to avoid fallen limbs and brush too dense to crash through.

Even with her seatbelt fastened Pat didn't feel confident she wouldn't be thrown from the vehicle. She held as tight as she could to the dashboard while craning her neck to see behind them. They were making too much noise themselves to tell just from listening if anyone was following.

The jeep bumped on through the forest, splashed across a small stream, strained up a grass-covered bank, and rattled through a clearing. Pat, her throat dry again with fear, held on for dear life and tried not to scream every time a branch slapped across the jeep.

Abruptly Dr. Jackson brought the jeep to a halt and killed the engine. They sat, straining to hear over the whir of the engine fan for any noise of pursuit. Nothing.

"If they find our trail, it won't be hard to track us from all those broken branches," Dr. Jackson mused finally.

Pat sighed. She hadn't wanted to voice that particular sentiment. "It should take them a while, though. Maybe they won't notice the jeep's gone for a long time. The vehicles are hidden behind that shed."

"Once they realize we're gone--"

Pat cut him off, holding up her hand and setting her head in a 'listening' pose. She hadn't really heard anything, but did not want him saying something that would bring their pursuers down on them.

Dr. Jackson listened hard, forehead wrinkled in concentration. "I didn't hear anything," he said.

"Probably just a bird." Were there birds in this forest? She couldn't remember hearing any before. But now the occasional rustle and chirp told of their presence, and she wondered if her statement had brought them suddenly to 'life' here.

"If they were behind us, they'd be scaring the birds, so I think it's safe to say we've lost them for now." Dr. Jackson let out a breath and sagged against the slightly canted seat of the jeep, his eyes closed and his face so gray with pain and fatigue that Pat ached for him.

Pat remembered the sack of groceries on the floor between her feet. She pulled out two more bottles of water, and handed one to Dr. Jackson. "Here. Drink up. Water does us more good inside than out."

"Were you a Girl Scout when you were young?" Dr. Jackson asked, taking the bottle without opening his eyes. He held it against his forehead and sighed.

"Nope. But I camped a lot. Backpacking, actually."

"Married for nearly a year and I didn't even know that."

_What the. . .?_ She didn't dare ask him what he meant, for fear whatever or whoever would start choking her again. But had Dr. Jackson meant he thought she and he were . . . married? Perhaps it was all part of this bizarre virtual reality--or whatever it was. After all, she wasn't pregnant in 'real life,' either.

She skirted the statement. "We had other things to talk about." She rummaged through the sack. "Jerky. That's good."

"Don't know if I have the strength to chew it," Dr. Jackson said. His voice was weak and thready again.

Pat glanced at him in concern. "Another painkiller for you. And then . . ." she looked into the sack again, ". . .there's yogurt. Don't need to chew that."

Dr. Jackson swallowed the painkillers and found the strength to lick yogurt out of the carton. Pat had dug through all her pockets and found nothing she could use as a spoon. Then he leaned back against the seat again.

Chewing jerky, Pat said, "Move to the passenger seat. I'll drive now."

Dr. Jackson protested weakly, and she said, "Hey, that's how we met--I was driving the truck for SG-1. Or have you forgotten?" At least that part was true, from 'real life.'

"But your leg's hurt."

"It's the left one. Don't need it when I'm driving." Pray that be so. "You were driving most of the time in second gear, weren't you? So I won't need to push the clutch much." There. That should forestall him saying anything else about her using her hurt leg while driving. She hoped.

She released the parking brake and pushed in the clutch with her right foot, figuring the rough ground they were on would keep them from rolling anywhere, then turned the key. The engine started right up, and she juggled clutch and gas with one foot until the jeep lurched forward. Now, to get the darned thing into second without passing out from pain.

"Good thing that knee's feeling better," she muttered, wondering if it would help. She straightened her left leg slowly and pushed on the clutch with her left heel. The clutch was a little stiff, and pain shot through her knee up into her hip, but she wrenched the gear shift into second and released the clutch. "We should have found an automatic," she complained.

"I don't think old military jeeps come in automatic," Dr. Jackson whispered.

"It figures." _Maybe I ought to start thinking of him as 'Daniel' if we're supposed to be married._ It seemed odd, but it would be even stranger if she called him 'Dr. Jackson' and he wondered why she'd become so formal.

The jeep roared through the forest, heading, she hoped, toward the Stargate. The map had showed it about five miles from the camp. The terrain started sloping down as they neared the Stargate, and the trees became fewer. It wouldn't have taken long if they'd followed the road, but here in the forest, roaring along at ten miles an hour, slewing the jeep around trees and boulders, they'd be lucky to get there in an hour or two.

_And what will we do when we get to the Stargate?_ Pat thought, glancing over her shoulder, as she drove through a large meadow, to see how Daniel was doing. Not well. His face was still gray with pain and shock. _He must be hurt somewhere else and didn't want to tell me,_ she thought.

An unmistakable CRACK sounded behind them, and Pat instinctively ducked, then sat back up straight to jerk the jeep around a tree on the far side of the clearing. The bullet that had been aimed at them slammed into foliage behind them.

"Shit!" Pat slammed the jeep around a tree, trying to put some cover between them and whoever was shooting back there. More shots, a barrage that was deflected by leaves and trees. "Daniel, what should we do? You've got more experience here," she panted.

"Stay in the jeep," he ordered. "Can't be that much farther to the Stargate, and you can't walk. They can't aim well with the trees in the way."

"Right." She put on speed, scraping off olive-drab paint on a tree's trunk as they skinned past.

"Since they had us captive, I doubt they want to kill us," Daniel added, his voice a bit stronger.

Pat didn't answer, concentrating all her effort on bouncing the jeep over a rocky outcrop, then through a thin screen of brush. A branch scraped her left leg, but she hardly noticed. "Shit!" she cried again, as the jeep jolted over a bank and nearly high centered. The tires spun in the sod on the other side of the bank, then caught and the doughty jeep climbed the steeper bank and bounced over it.

"This is a _good_ jeep!" she yelled, jouncing down a short hillside and out onto ground that was mostly waist-high brush and the fleshy local 'grass.'

"There's the Stargate!" came Daniel's call. Another barrage of bullets echoed his words.

Pat slammed the jeep into third gear, the pain in her knee when she pushed in the clutch nearly blacking her out. They bounced through the brush, and she felt it tearing across the bottom of the jeep, but didn't slow down. She remembered that the tires on the other two jeeps had been much worse than hers. "Let's hope those other jeeps get flat tires," she yelled.

Daniel didn't answer. She risked a sideways look, and saw him clutching the doorframe and twisting to look back at their pursuers. "They haven't come over that rise yet," he said.

"Good." The Stargate was getting closer.

"They've abandoned the vehicles, and they're coming on foot," yelled Daniel.

"We're still faster," Pat said. "Got a Stargate address we can use? We can't go back to Earth--we don't have a GDO."

"Uh. . . ." Long silence. "Yeah, I've got one. Stop by the DHD and I'll dial, then wait for the kawoosh and you can drive the jeep right through."

"Cool!" Would they get away with it? If whoever was running this bizarre scenario didn't want them to get away, Daniel's plan wouldn't work. Plan B? Her brains were too shaken by the jouncing of the jeep to think of plan B.

Stacks of crates, and piles of stuff Pat couldn't identify, littered the ground around the Stargate. She started braking, to come even with the DHD, and bullets peppered the jeep from the Stargate side. A bullet cracked the windshield--in very best Hollywood fashion--and Pat skidded the jeep around to put its bulk between Daniel and whoever had the rifles.

He leaned out and dialed the sequence rapidly into the DHD as bullets pinged off the jeep's metallic sides.

"You can do it, you can do it," Pat intoned, hoping this dramatic scene would be enough for whoever was doing this to them.

She forgot to say anything about herself. As Daniel hit the red dome in the center of the DHD a bullet took her in the shoulder. The shock of it, on top of everything else, blacked her out for a few seconds. She came to with Daniel shaking her good shoulder and yelling, "Just a few more feet!"

Luckily her left leg was almost numb now; she could barely feel it as she jammed it onto the clutch one more time and shifted into first gear. The jeep bumped oddly over the ground; someone had shot out the tires. They started up the steps to the Stargate's shimmering surface as men started swarming onto the jeep, pulling at Pat and Daniel. She slammed her foot onto the gas pedal, and the jeep surged forward--

--and stalled out inches from the Stargate's surface.

"Damn you! Damn whoever is--" Pat started to choke again as ungentle hands grabbed her shoulder and she blacked out from the pain.


	3. Chapter 3: Disaster

_At least it isn't dirty straw and rats this time_, Pat mused fuzzily as she awoke. She had rather hoped that when she passed out she would wake up back at the SGC in bed, but that hadn't happened. She could tell by the pain in her left shoulder and knee, and the sound of Dr. Jackson--no, _Daniel_--talking to her.

"Pat? Are you awake? How are you feeling?" Daniel's voice, sounding upset and worried.

The real Daniel probably didn't even know her first name. So she was still in the "create-your-own-adventure."

"Pat?" Now Daniel knelt at her side, his voice much quieter. "I think they're gone." She felt his hands, first at the neckline of her tee-shirt, then her abdomen. At any other time she would have enjoyed his touch. But she knew this wasn't real--especially when he asked, "Is the baby okay?"

Definitely still not back to reality. She was _not_ pregnant! She sighed and opened her eyes. Trying to sit up demonstrated to Pat just how sore she was. That bumpy trip in the jeep, as well as everything else, had added bruises on bruises. She felt a warm arm along her back, helping her up. It was easy, and comforting, to lean against Daniel--but he couldn't help in this situation, because she couldn't tell him about it.

"The baby is just fine," she said, and knew it was true--in this reality--as she felt that odd little flutter in her abdomen again.

"You were lucky," he said, "the bullet that got you in the shoulder hit your vest. You've got quite the bruise, but I don't have to add 'surgeon' to my list of accomplishments quite yet."

Daniel sounded exhausted, and Pat twisted to look at him. His face was pale, though the burn on his cheek looked much better.

"I'm okay," Pat said, "but you need sleep. Lie down, and I'll watch out."

The fact that he didn't protest, but just lay down on the rumpled and rather smelly blankets and closed his eyes, worried Pat. She folded one blanket under his head and pulled another over him. Would wounds they got here--wherever _here_ was--carry over to the real world? She didn't think so, but how could she be sure?

To pass the time--and to keep herself warm--she pushed herself, groaning, to her feet, checking her surroundings out as she paced. They were in a roughly built building, cold wind blowing between unchinked logs. The floor was packed dirt, and besides the two of them, their blankets, and a bucket that she guessed from the smell was meant for a toilet, the building was empty. The only light came through two small windows just below the roofline.

Pat used the bucket, pushed it to the corner farthest from the two of them, and inspected the single door. Its hinges were on the inside, but their captors had taken her multi-tool, along with her vest and uniform jacket. They'd left her boots, pants --with the pockets emptied--and tee-shirt. No more McGyver tricks with what she had in her pockets!

Daniel coughed, and she thought it sounded bad--kind of bubbly. Although she remembered how gray and tired he'd looked, she suspected this was just _Whoever_ pulling her chain, trying to get something dramatic going again.

_What if I don't play along?_ she thought. She suspected _Whoever_ would give her something to react to, in that case. Better to have events under her nominal control than _Whoever_'s. She stopped her pacing of the walls and bent over Daniel. "Nothing's wrong with him that a good night's sleep won't cure," she stated emphatically.

The grumbling of her stomach reminded her that it had been a long time since those energy bars. "It's about time we got some food here," she complained. She was shivering, sitting on the cold ground, so got up and started pacing again.

The light coming in from the tiny windows had nearly faded when noise outside the door alerted Pat. Since this building obviously hadn't been a prison originally, the door opened inward and she could hide behind it. She seized the stinking bucket and waited.

Two men came through the door. The first held a pistol and a flashlight. The light swept across the room until it halted on Daniel, asleep in the tangle of blankets. As the man stepped in farther Pat threw the contents of the bucket into his face.

The man yelled an obscenity, dropped both pistol and flashlight, and started wiping at his face with his shirt tail. The second man, taken completely by surprise, collapsed when Pat hit him with the bucket.

Pat dived for the pistol. She grabbed it, rolled, and came up pointing it at the man dripping with piss. Still swearing, he lunged toward her, and she reversed the pistol and hit him in the temple with its butt.

He kept coming.

"That always works in the movies," Pat said under her breath, scrambling backward and almost falling over Daniel. The man rushed for her, and she hit him again with the pistol butt. This time he fell and lay still.

"What. . . ?" asked Daniel muzzily.

"No time to explain. Can you walk?" Pat grabbed a blanket and pulled it over her shoulders like a shawl.

"I think so." She helped him to his feet. "Bring a blanket."

As he slung a blanket around his shoulders, she picked up the flashlight from where it had rolled against the wall and lay illuminating part of a log, turned it off, and stuck it in one of the pockets on the leg of her BDU pants.

Daniel helped her drag the two unconscious men farther into the hut. "They smell like an outhouse," he said as she peered cautiously out the door.

"Shhh."

In the dusk she counted seven men moving around in the camp. Lights on poles illuminated the headquarters building and the area where the vehicles were parked, but the rest of the camp was dark.

Daniel joined her in the doorway, gazing out into the gathering darkness. "I think we can get around the building without anyone seeing us if we're careful," he whispered. "Then head for the forest. How's your leg? You seem to be walking on it okay now."

She had forgotten that her leg had been hurt. It ached a bit, but the pain was mostly gone. "Much better," she whispered back. "How about you?"

"My ribs ache something fierce," he said, "but I don't think they're broken, just bruised."

Daniel leaned forward a bit, intent on the activity outside the building. "Follow me," came his voice, just a thread of sound.

"Do you want the pistol?" she asked, as quietly as he.

"I'm not that good with guns." Even in his whisper she heard the self deprecation. "You keep it." A long pause, then, "Let's go _now_."

He slid out around the side of the building, and Pat followed, feeling her back prickle with the dread that someone might be behind her with a gun.

Once around the building, Daniel bunched his blanket under his arm and walked with a purposeful stride, as if he had every right to be there. Pat also pulled the blanket off her shoulders and stayed at his side; just two more people in military uniforms with business elsewhere in the camp. They kept to the darkness between the car park and headquarters, and were almost to the trees to the north when yelling began in the camp.

"We'll make it," Pat whispered; half a prayer and half a command to _Whoever_. Both she and Daniel turned toward the shouting, the picture of people with no idea what anyone had to yell about.

It didn't work. People were running toward them, and the first crack of gunfire made Pat flinch.

"I think we run _now_," Daniel said, and they did.

The forest at night was a tangle of branches and brush that tore at hair and clothing and tripped them up. After a few minutes of crashing through the trees, Daniel grabbed Pat's arm. "Down into this brush. They'll think we kept running."

Again she had to wonder if he'd caught on. That flat statement. . . .

Shouts, pounding feet, bullets through the brush until somebody yelled, "Hey, you jackass, you almost shot _me_." Their captors bumbled farther and farther away from where Pat and Daniel crouched, scarcely breathing.

When the sounds were far away, Daniel wormed his way as quietly as possible out from under the sheltering branches. He stood for long moments, his barely seen profile silhouetted against a starlit sky. "Coast is clear," came his whisper.

Pat started crawling out, until one leg pocket of her BDU pants caught fast on a branch. "Hang on," she whispered. "I'm stuck."

Daniel was just bending to help her when someone stepped out from behind a tree. "Stop right there. Don't move."

They froze. Belatedly, Pat remembered the pistol she'd taken from the men who'd brought them dinner. It had been hampering her progress out of the brush, and she'd set it down. Figuring she was almost invisible in the dark, she inched her hand toward the weapon. When she had it in her grasp she aimed, squeezed the trigger, and shot the man in the calf.

The shot was startling loud in the stillness of the forest. The man cursed and grabbed for his leg. Daniel, barely seen in the darkness beneath the trees, seized a branch from the ground and brought it down on the man's arm. Only when something flew into the underbrush near her did Pat realize the man had been holding a gun.

Daniel scooped up the weapon and aimed it at the man. "Quickly!" he called to Pat. She ripped her pocket away from the branch that held it and wriggled out of the bushes, out of arm's reach of the man. He didn't seem to have been badly injured by her shot, and remained a threat.

Grabbing her hand, Daniel started off through the trees at an angle to where they'd last heard pursuers. The man Pat had shot started yelling, and Daniel muttered something Pat couldn't quite catch. He yanked her off at a different angle, and they stumbled on through the trees and brush for awhile, listening to the renewed shouts of their pursuers.

After what seemed like forever, as exhaustion set in and they moved more and more slowly through the dark, Daniel said, "Let's go to ground again." People were still crashing around and yelling throughout the forest, and it was more likely she and Daniel would run into their erstwhile captors than away from them if they kept stumbling about.

"Sounds good," Pat replied. "Let them shoot each other." She could hope _that_ comment influenced _Whoever_.

Daniel was exploring ahead of her, and she heard his soft, "There's a boulder or something here. No, wait, it's not a cliff. It's _ruins_." His voice caressed the word 'ruins,' and Pat smiled. Archaeologist heaven.

Pat managed to stop herself before, 'Won't they expect us to hole up in the ruins?' was more than just a thought. Instead she said, "These guys are from off planet just like we are. I doubt they know the ruins are here."

Her comment was answered by nothing but the rustle of his clothing. Pat squinted through the dark to see what he was doing. She edged closer to the ruins, putting out a hand to feel the rough stone. The wall seemed to be covered with vines, in the best Indiana Jones fashion, and Pat had to stifle a giggle. _Yeah, tropical vines in this cold climate._

"In here," came Daniel's whisper. "This part feels stable." She slid fingers lightly along the wall, found what might be a doorway, and stepped with some trepidation into complete blackness. She wondered if predators laired here. She'd smell rotting carrion, or maybe feces, if this were an animal's den; all she caught with a tentative sniff was the musky smell of the vines she'd disturbed.

"Do you still have that flashlight you liberated from our captors?" came Daniel's voice. "These walls seem solid enough that light shouldn't alert anyone looking for us."

Pat pulled the flashlight out of her pocket and groped in the dark until she found Daniel's hand. She enjoyed the touch of his fingers, as she transferred the flashlight to his grip, rather too much for her peace of mind. _Daniel Jackson doesn't even know me. This might not even be the real Daniel Jackson, just a figment of my imagination. I didn't have feelings for him before now. Why was __he__ picked for my companion in this . . . adventure? Why not someone I know better?_

Befuddled by her reaction, she wasn't paying attention to what Daniel was doing until he whispered, "Look! These are the same as the symbols in the ruins on P3R-118."

P3R-118 was the planet SG-1 had been exploring when she'd been sent to help. The SGC had been trying something new--sending a truck through the Stargate to bring back artifacts too bulky for the team to carry. She'd been the driver of the truck.

"This is great!" Daniel continued. "I didn't find much writing on P3R-118, so I had nowhere to even _start_ translating it. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, on Earth or any other planet." He swept the flashlight around the room they found themselves in. Writing covered the walls and ceiling, incised into the stone. "The Goa'uld destroyed the civilization on that planet pretty thoroughly, but from the few things we found, it must have been advanced--maybe even more advanced than ours."

"Uh, Daniel." Pat tugged his shirt sleeve.

Daniel ran a hand over the incised symbols on one wall. "I wish I had a camera. I recognize this grouping--it was in the ruins on P3R-118."

"Daniel!" Pat was more insistent now. "This isn't reallya good time. There are people out there trying to _shoot_ us. You know the ruins are here now, and we can come back with reinforcements from the SGC. But right now, I think we need to worry about--"

A shout--much too close--cut her off. She seized the flashlight out of Daniel's hand, turned it off, and stuffed it back into her leg pocket. Then both stood silent, listening to the sounds out in the forest.

When Pat got her alarm under control, she realized that she huddled against Daniel. His rapid breathing matched hers, and his chest was warm against her shoulder. _Stop it_, Pat told herself. _This isn't real. He __is__ a hunk, but he won't even look at you in reality. And there are far more serious things to worry about right now._

"We need to get out of here," Daniel breathed against her ear. "We're sitting ducks in here if they find the ruins."

"And ducks are bad," Pat retorted absently, feeling her way out through the darkness.

Back into the forest. Outside the shelter of the ruins, Pat shivered in the wind, wishing her captors hadn't taken her uniform jacket, and she hadn't left that blanket tangled in the bushes.

Feeling her shivering, Daniel pulled her against him. "Seems a lot colder now, doesn't it?" he whispered.

Pat couldn't even answer. Why did it have to feel so nice, snuggled against this man? She had to keep reminding herself that this wasn't real.

"Where to now?" she asked, her voice trembling.

Daniel sighed. "Out. Away. Somewhere there aren't people trying to shoot us." He released her, and the wind against her shoulders and back, where Daniel had warmed them, was doubly cold.

The sky was lightening in the direction that must be east. They'd better find cover _fast._ It was still dark under the trees, but it wouldn't be for long.

They needed to go east to get to the Stargate. If they had to hide from search parties all day, they should move closer to the Stargate, so it would be easier to reach it after dark.

"Daniel--" Pat began.

"That's them!" Crashing through the brush and trees all around them. _No way they could have found us!_ Pat thought. _Is __Whoever__ cheating even worse now? Giving us away to the enemy?_

Daniel grabbed her arm again. "This way," he panted, already running, pulling her along. They headed north, since shouting and crashing through the trees and brush sounded from the other three directions.

Pat tried to remember the map Daniel had brought out of the headquarters building. She thought the trees thinned out to the north, part of the lower terrain like that around the Stargate. Right now they needed cover, and there wasn't cover to the north.

"Daniel, we need to circle around as soon as we can," she managed between gasps, ducking a barely seen branch and nearly tripping over a stone. "We'll lose the cover of the woods if we keep going north."

"_If_ we can," he answered.

To validate his statement, a yell came from the east, "Over there." Then from behind, "I see them."

"We still have the pistols," Pat reminded Daniel as she followed him.

"Not enough ammo in them to make a difference," he said.

Pat winced. It would be true now. "It might make them back off long enough that we can get away." She did not want to think what their captors would do to them if they re-captured them. _Whoever_ would probably get more creative this time.

"Stop!" someone yelled behind them. "Stop or I'll shoot."

Daniel's answer was to duck behind a tree, putting it between him and the man who had shouted. Pat followed an instant later.

The sky was much lighter now, so it was easier to find their footing, but they were also obvious among the spindly trees and underbrush--they were definitely out of the thicker part of the forest.

A bullet whined through the branches, then another. Pat winced and ducked, but kept running. She and Daniel were heading northeast now, and a glimpse of the rising sun momentarily blinded her. She stumbled, and a bullet flew over her head. Then she and Daniel were in the midst of a veritable barrage of bullets. From three sides bullets ricocheted from branches and whizzed past their heads.

"Keep running," Daniel said.

Pat kept running. The trees were barely as tall as they now, and the underbrush was thicker. They had to watch their footing constantly, all the while cringing from bullets pinging past. "These guys shoot as badly as the Storm Troopers in Star Wars," she said between gasps for breath. A stitch was starting in her side, and her knee and the shoulder where she'd been shot throbbed.

"Let's hope so."

They ran up a short grassy bank, where the undergrowth thinned out. Pat clutched her side where it ached and put on a burst of speed to keep up with Daniel.

Then, with a choked "Oh my God!" Daniel flung up his hands, scrabbled for a hold on the brush, and disappeared from view.

Pat tried to stop, her boots slipping as they crushed the fleshy grass-like plants. A bullet thudded into the ground just behind her, and she recoiled, put too much weight on her bad knee, and overbalanced. She tried to find purchase among the whippy branches of the brush as she slid sideways over the edge of a cliff.

#

Well, it's not a cliffhanger! They actually fell over the cliff! ;)


	4. Chapter 4: Epiphany

Pat had a brief, dizzying view of a rocky stream bed several hundred feet below her as she fell, and then a tooth-jarring jerk brought her up short, hanging upside down. She hardly dared to move, unsure why she hadn't plunged into the rocks.

When her heart had calmed some, no longer hammering madly in her throat, she looked up to see what had caught her. The pocket she had torn crawling out of the bushes had snagged on a branch--a branch that seemed far too slender to hold her weight.

_This is just too much_, she thought, choking down near-hysterical laughter. _Something right out of all the stories I read and movies I saw as a kid. Tarzan, maybe, or Indiana Jones._ Then it occurred to her that yes, it probably _was_ out of some--or all--of those larger-than-life adventures. If the incidents for this 'adventure' were being taken from her mind, what _other_ crazy things would happen to her here? She'd seen and read so _many_ improbable things.

The branch holding her started to creak alarmingly, and she decided she'd better do something or she _would_ get dropped into the rocks below. Slowly, the muscles of her thighs and stomach protesting, she curled up until she grasped the branch. The cramping discomfort in her abdomen reminded her that _here_ she was pregnant, and she needed to be careful.

The pocket that had saved her was hard to unsnag from the branch. She scrabbled around for awhile, wishing she had a pocket knife or something to cut the stupid thing free. Her shoulders felt wrenched, and the branch was cutting into her palms and fingers as she held on with one hand and tried to get the pocket disengaged with the other. Finally it ripped free and her legs dropped, wrenching her shoulders further and loosing an alarming avalanche of pebbles from the roots of the gnarled tree that had saved her.

She grabbed at the branch with her other hand, then hung panting for a moment, unsure how to get back up the cliff from here.

Did she _want_ to get back up the cliff? She and Daniel had been pursued by at least a dozen men with rifles; to climb back up was to risk capture once more.

Trying to ignore the pain in her hands, arms, and shoulders as she hung from the branch, she studied the cliff face not that far from her face. The rock was striated in layers, the more delicate worn away by wind and water to form all kinds of ledges and hand- or footholds.

Daniel slumped on a ledge not far below her; barely eighteen inches wide, it had obviously broken his fall. _Another adventure movie cliché_, Pat thought. She looked up, and saw men waving their arms and yelling on the cliff edge above, but they didn't seem to have spotted her. Maybe her BDU pants blended in well with the greens and browns of stone and stunted trees. _Or maybe __Whoever__ just doesn't want us to be seen right now_.

"Daniel?" she queried in a voice just over a whisper.

He shook his head as if to clear it and looked up. "Pat. Thank God you're safe."

"You too," she said.

"Can you get down here?" He clutched his side and winced, and Pat wondered if he'd further damaged the ribs that had been bruised before.

"I think so." As the branch creaked alarmingly she reached with one foot for a possible foothold in the cliff side. Next she spotted a handhold, and carefully transferred her death grip from branch to stone. Another foothold, then she moved her other hand from the gnarled tree just as its roots pulled free of the niche it had grown from and it tumbled to the rocky streambed below.

Again, Pat had to stifle laughter. Such a cliché, the tree pulling free just as she let go. Then a blinding insight into what was going on occurred to her. _Whoever_ didn't want her to die. If she did, the adventure would be over. She could be captured, hurt, cold and hungry and in pain, but she couldn't die.

Did that go for Daniel as well? It would seem so, or he would have plunged over the cliff to his death rather than been caught on the ledge. So the plucky heroine and the sexy archaeologist had to stay alive to complete their adventure. Would _Whoever_ let the story come to an end, let the hero and heroine embrace and live happily ever after? She wouldn't bet on it. They were providing too much entertainment.

Could they get out of this--go home, wake up, whatever--by _dying_ in the adventure? Was it worth the risk to try? Should she just let go now, and see what happened? Or would she actually fall, hit the rocks below, and lie injured and in agony for the men above to recapture?

No, if she tried to get herself killed, it would have to be a very _sure_ death. Like putting the barrel of her pistol in her mouth and pulling the trigger. She shuddered. Suicide wasn't in her nature, especially cold, premeditated suicide like that.

The pain in her fingers reminded her that she was clinging like Spiderman to the cliff side. With a sigh, Pat started looking for hand- and footholds that would get her down the cliff to the ledge where Daniel waited. She'd let that idea simmer in the back of her mind while they tried to figure out what to do next.

#

Two hours later, scratched, shivering, and aching, Pat and Daniel stood at the bottom of the ravine. Daniel knelt and scooped water from the stream into his hands. He slurped water, then washed his face, avoiding the burn on his cheek.

Pat squatted beside him and did the same, hissing with the cold. Drinking reminded her that it had been a long time since they had eaten anything; she'd knocked the men who'd brought them their evening meal unconscious, and hadn't thought to grab the food before she and Daniel escaped.

They hadn't seen anyone at the cliff edge for awhile. Did the men think them dead on the rocks? Had they gone for ropes so they could climb down and find out?

"Now what?" she asked wearily. She couldn't remember when she'd been so tired, when she'd hurt so much in so many different places.

Daniel had dropped to sit on a rock against the foot of the cliff, favoring his ribs. Now he stood, and the face he turned to her looked slightly less gray and drawn. "I think this is the same stream we drove across in the jeep," he said. "If we follow this ravine, we should get to where we can climb out and get to the Stargate."

_Whoever_ hadn't let them get through the Stargate last time, but she couldn't tell Daniel that. Maybe _Whoever_ would allow them through this time, to add another dimension to the adventure.

"The sides of this ravine are pocked with openings. Let's find a good deep one, and we can hide out during the day and head for the Stargate at dusk." Even as she spoke, Pat started off down the ravine, heading roughly eastward.

They threaded their way down the cut, stepping from rock to rock, avoiding stepping in the icy water whenever possible. The exercise warmed them, but the air was still cold, even now that the sun had risen.

Pat got a kink in her neck from looking up all the time to see if the men had spotted them and were coming for them again. She was staggering with weariness when Daniel said, "Let's try this one."

The cavelet started at about knee height and was around four feet high and maybe ten feet deep. It looked like it had been carved out sometime when the stream had been deeper and swifter and had worn away the softer stone at that level.

Again, Pat sniffed for any indication that the cave had been used as an animal lair, but found nothing. Maybe this planet didn't have animals? That sounded ridiculous until she remembered that there hadn't been birds in the forest until she'd mentioned them. If they didn't mention animals, would animals ever exist here?

Daniel scraped out a mess of old dried branches, grass, and small stones until the cavelet was reasonably clean. They both climbed in and sat, huddled together. "You sleep; I'll keep watch," said Daniel.

"They'll never see us in here," Pat stated. "It slopes down as it goes back. If we scoot all the way in, they won't see us even if they go past in the ravine."

Daniel must be awfully tired to accept that without an argument, Pat worried. He just nodded and crawled toward the back of the cave. Soon they were lying on the hard cold stone, Pat's back against Daniel's chest and his arm around her shoulders. She was too tired to even appreciate the feel of his body against hers. Despite the chill she slept almost instantly.

It was dark when Pat opened gritty eyes and groaned at the aches in her right shoulder and hip, which had been in contact with the stone as she slept. Daniel was a warm presence at her back. The arm that he had flung over her shoulder had slid down as they slept, and now his hand gently covered her breast.

_Whoa, hold on there, girl_, Pat told herself as she started to snuggle closer, enjoying his touch. _Not real, remember? Not real._ She was _not_ going to give _Whoever_ a free show, even if this was the 'romance' part of the adventure. The faintest movement within her abdomen reminded her that _here_ she and Daniel were married, that _here_ she was pregnant. Though the temptation was strong, she would _not_ give in.

Daniel stirred, and despite her resolve Pat regretted it when he moved his hand. He groaned just as she had, and pushed himself gingerly to a sitting position.

She did the same, brushing grit from her cheek. Her shoulders touched the stone above. "I don't suppose we dare risk the flashlight," she said. Her throat was dry and her mouth tasted foul.

"No." Daniel's answer was muffled as he crawled toward the cave's entrance. He groaned again.

"What?" Pat asked in alarm.

"As if we weren't already miserable. It's raining."

When he said that, Pat's exhausted, aching mind recognized the smell niggling at the edge of her consciousness. Damp foliage and stone, a hint of ozone. She wanted to scream, _Let us go! We've had enough!_ Instead, she said, "Well, at least it's not snow. Maybe those guys will give up the search since it's cold, dark and wet," in a voice that shook more than a little.

"Let's keep hoping." Daniel sighed.

They crawled down from their cave into the cold drizzle. It didn't take the rain long to soak through their tee shirts; by the time they had cupped water from the stream to drink and started off down the ravine they were both shivering.

Daniel started talking, telling Pat of some of his missions on other planets. She suspected it was to keep his mind off his misery, but the stories fascinated her nonetheless. He'd actually talked to non-humans, like the Unas. He was piecing together a dictionary of Ancient, the language of the Gate builders. With his love of languages, no wonder he'd been excited to find those ruins. She wondered if this planet was somewhere real, if those ruins actually existed for him to come back and explore.

They had to walk slowly over the rain-slick stones. Pat found that keeping one hand on the wall of the ravine, though the cold numbed her fingers, helped steady her. When she started feeling plant life instead of stone, she told Daniel, "I think we're getting to the end of the ravine, where the stream isn't cut in so deep."

He had been quiet for awhile, and the sound of his boots splashing in the stream or scraping over the rocks had been her only sign that he was still ahead of her, the night was so black. But now he said, "Pat, I'm sorry I got you into this."

"You didn't get me into anything," she retorted. "We just found ourselves here." She didn't dare say anything else, for fear the choking would begin again: _Whoever_ keeping her from telling him what was really happening.

"I should have quit the SGC--we should both have quit--when you got pregnant." He stopped suddenly and turned, pulling her into a cold, wet embrace. "Pat, I can't lose you, too."

He was trembling. Was it just the cold? "We're together," she said, wishing this were real, wishing there really _was_ someone who cared for her like this. "That's what's important."

"Yeah." He was quiet for awhile, and they just stood, sharing body warmth. Then he said, in a puzzled tone, "I can't think why Jack and Sam and Teal'c haven't come for us by now. It's been _days_."

"Maybe they don't know where we are--any more than we do."

"They're very good at figuring things like this out."

_I doubt they've ever experienced anything quite like __this_, Pat thought. But it was true that SG-1 was famous for discovering the key to dilemmas when everyone else had given up. For the first time since she'd awakened in that stinking shed, she felt the tiniest ray of hope. Could SG-1 figure this out and rescue them?

She slogged on, her feet numb in her soaked boots. She was limping rather badly now, the knee she'd hurt earlier sending shooting pain up into her hip with every step. It couldn't be that much farther now, could it?

"Pat!" Daniel's voice was low but excited. "I've found the place we forded the stream in the jeep. It's just a scramble up this bank now." He was already up, and she could see him, black against black, in the faint light of a few stars. The drizzle seemed to be stopping for now, and the clouds moving on.

"Here." Daniel leaned down, and she sensed more than saw the hand he reached out to help her up. Once again, his touch awoke something within her that she refused to acknowledge.

Her foot slipped on the wet, fleshy plants lining the stream bank, but Daniel pulled her up steadily. Moments later they stood on the bank, peering in the direction they thought was east.

"I wish I could see better," Daniel said. Pat blinked and realized that Daniel had been not been wearing his glasses since the beginning of this 'adventure.' So he had the added disadvantage, in the faint light from the now-clearing sky, of having everything blurred by his nearsightedness.

"This way." Pat fancied she could see, silhouetted against the sky, the comforting bulk of the Stargate. It wasn't that close, but they should make it before dawn.

They trudged, shivering, between spindly trees that dropped leaf-loads of rain onto them. By the time they had gained the muddy flatlands they were shivering worse than ever; a breeze had sprung up after the rain.

As they slogged between knee-high prickly bushes and waist-high grass clumps, Pat thought about her earlier epiphany. _Whoever__ doesn't want us to die._ Should she test that theory if their captors caught up with them again? Stand directly in front of one of their weapons and goad its owner into shooting? She didn't have a vest to deflect a bullet this time, but she wouldn't be surprised if some freak accident kept the bullet from doing more than just adding to her freight of misery. What could she do that would be _assured_ to kill her in this crazy adventure?

She'd been trudging, head down, exhaustion weighting her mud-laden boots. Daniel, just ahead, stumbled and she put out a hand to steady him. She was heartened to see how close the Stargate was. Would they actually be able to escape this time? Couldn't this adventure continue on another planet, away from guys shooting at them with guns? _Yeah_, her internal cynic said. _Trade guys shooting at us with rifles for Jaffa shooting at us with staff weapons?_

"Got that Stargate address ready?" she whispered.

"Yeah. As soon as I dial, be ready to sprint for the Gate."

Sprint. She might be able to sprint, if she could fall over in a dead faint once she got to the other end of the wormhole. "Where are we go--"

Men with rifles rose from hiding places behind the crates scattered around the Stargate. Their captors had done this before; how could she have forgotten? Why hadn't she and Daniel realized that the men would know they were heading for the Stargate and ambush them here? She could only blame hunger, pain and exhaustion for their lack of brainpower.

"You there! Stop, or we'll shoot. Stand still and put your hands on top of your heads."

She pulled the pistol out of her leg pocket. She didn't even know if it would fire; her pants were soaked, between the rain and the many times she'd slipped into the stream. But did it matter?

"Quick, Daniel, dial the Gate. I'll cover you."

"Here." Daniel handed her the other pistol and raced for the DHD. She pushed the second pistol into her waistband.

Pat got a good stance, steadied her right hand with her left, and aimed for the half-seen bulk of the man who'd yelled at them. When she squeezed the trigger, she was answered with a _click_. She tried again and again, with the same results, then dropped that pistol and pulled out Daniel's.

This time, expecting nothing, she was surprised by the report and the kick. But the shot sped true, and the man who'd yelled cursed and fell backward.

Pat blinked, found another target, and squeezed the trigger once more. Another report; another good shot, as a man hardly distinguishable from the crate he hid behind fell.

Daniel had crouched to run for the DHD, and it was still dark enough that Pat didn't think the men could see him well. So she assured she was very noticeable. She yelled, jumped up, and ran toward the Stargate--but not so close to the DHD that anything fired at her might hit Daniel.

The men behind the crates started shooting, and Pat zig-zagged as best she could through the brush. Her third shot with Daniel's pistol clicked uselessly, but it wouldn't have done much but make noise anyway, as she was moving too erratically to aim.

Bullets whizzed past her head, hit the ground all around her, but never touched her. She thought grimly, _I was right! __Whoever__ doesn't want to kill us._

Then the idea came like lightning through the fog of pain, hunger and fatigue. _The kawoosh as the Stargate opens can kill us without any possibility of missing._

Completely reckless now, Pat, screamed and charged the men who were shooting at her. How many of the symbols had Daniel already pressed? She remembered at least two, but her attention had been elsewhere. She couldn't tip anyone off--the men, Daniel or _Whoever_. It had to just _happen._

A bullet tore across the top of her shoulder, the pain shocking for an instant and then ignored. Daniel dialed the last symbol and pushed the red dome atop the DHD just as she reached him. She grabbed his arm and jerked him along, unheeding of his, "Pat! What are you--?"

She had an instant to think, _If I was wrong, I won't have a chance to regret it. And I'm dragging Daniel with me--_

The final chevron lit. The most hideous pain she'd felt in her life burned through her body as she and Daniel toppled into the kawoosh.


	5. Chapter 5: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Agony, every nerve afire as Pat's body was consumed by the energy that opened a wormhole through space. Then--

Nothing.

Pat sat up, gasping in air for a scream she never uttered.

Dark, but no sign of stars. She wasn't wet, shivering, and muddy. When she ran a hand over her shoulder, there was no sign of a bullet score--the fabric of her tee shirt was whole, and there was no blood.

She pushed down her blankets to lay both hands on her belly. A bubble of laughter shivered in her throat. Flat. _Not_ pregnant. _Not_ on a crazy planet where people were shooting at her. "I _did_ it, thank God! I'm _home!_" Her desperate gamble had paid off.

When she'd finished up Friday night so late, and decided to stay at Stargate Command, she hadn't had any civilian clothing with her. She'd worn her black uniform tee shirt to bed--and that was what she was wearing now.

She wasn't in the infirmary, but in the ugly concrete-walled room deep in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain where she'd fallen asleep. She checked her watch for the time. 0305. What _day_ was it? Saturday. Two or three days of pain, hunger, fear and uncertainty had all happened in four hours, realtime.

She turned on the bedside lamp and inspected her knee, which had been bruised and swollen. Smooth, unmarked flesh. Her shoulder, where the bullet had hit her vest and caused a nasty bruise, was similarly unmarked. Only the vivid memory of pain, suffering--and her physical attraction to Daniel--remained.

It had _not_ been a dream, of that she was certain. She remembered every detail as if she'd actually lived them. So what was it?

The ruins. There had been writing in the ruins, the same writing Daniel--no, Dr. Jackson, she'd have to be careful with that--had found on P3R-118. The only time she'd worked with Dr. Jackson had been on P3R-118.

She got out of bed and pulled on her uniform pants and boots. She knew where Dr. Jackson's lab was. Would it be locked up this time of night? Probably. But she had to go look, had to see if there was anything from P3R-118 in his lab. He--the Dr. Jackson in that weird experience--had said he'd been studying the symbols he'd photographed on P3R-118. So there should be something there now. And if there wasn't?

If there wasn't, then Second Lieutenant Patricia Yancy had best check in to the infirmary and let someone figure out why she was having these crazy realistic dreams.

Stargate Command runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even at 0330 there were people in the corridor outside the room Pat had been assigned, on level 14. A couple of MPs who had probably got off a swing shift not long before chatted amiably near the elevator.

On level 18 she was surprised to see people--both civilian and military--in the corridors at this hour of the night. Head down, pondering what seemed--to her--the last few days, Pat almost bumped into someone right in front of Dr. Jackson's archaeology laboratory.

"Sorry!" said a far-too-familiar voice.

"No, my fault. . . ." she began, trailing off as she stared into Dr. Jackson's face.

To be fair, he was staring at her, too. "P-pat?" he stammered.

"Um, Second Lieutenant Yancy, sir," she said. Better let him know right off, since it looked like he'd actually been in that . . . experience . . . with her, that she did _not_ expect him to treat her like . . . like his _wife_. Or even his friend.

The confusion on his face faded, to be replaced with the thin-lipped determination she'd seen back in that filthy shed. "Did you . . . do you remember . . . were you. . . ?"

Suddenly Pat's mouth was dry and her heart hammered. She couldn't think of anything to say, so she just nodded.

Daniel bit his lip and looked at her. "So what _was_ that?"

Pat managed, "I . . . was hoping you'd know." She was glad to see, now that she dared regard his face closely, that there was no trace of the ugly burn along his cheekbone. "You've been doing this sort of thing a lot longer than I have."

Dr. Jackson smiled, and she realized how seldom she'd seen him do it. _Be strong, Yancy_, she told herself. _He's got dimples._

"You had so many good ideas . . . _there_." He lifted a hand, as if he was about to lay it on her arm, and then stopped. Their gazes locked, and then they both looked down at the floor.

Pat felt she had to say _something_. "Well, those ruins. With the symbols like you found on P3R-118. P3R-118 is the planet where I worked with you. That's the only thing I can see that links you with me."

"And so you came to my lab to see if there was something there to help you figure this all out?"

She nodded mutely.

"You're good." He slid a key card into the slot at the side of the door, and gestured her into his lab when the door opened.

An odor of . . . alienness . . . wafted out. Not quite mold, or dirt, and more than old books and papers. A hint of metallic tang, a hint of cleaning solution. Pat knew she'd associate this smell with Dr. Jackson from now on.

They walked past interesting artifacts, cardboard boxes piled with unidentifiable things, and chairs stacked with antique-looking books buried in piles of paper. At any other time Pat would have been fascinated by the sheer accumulation of _things_ in the room, but currently her interest was in what lay on Dr. Jackson's desk. A sheaf of printouts of the photos taken on P3R-118, some with cryptic comments scribbled in their margins, had been dropped atop some of the smaller artifacts brought back from that planet.

Pat was fascinated to see the change in Dr. Jackson as he entered his own domain. He had been a competent veteran of hundreds of SGC missions when fleeing their captors. The only glimpse she had of this other Dr. Jackson had been in the ruins, where the man-of-action facade had sloughed off to reveal the scientist beneath.

Dr. Jackson picked up the printouts and shuffled through them. "See here." He pointed at one of the photos. "The only place we found writing was on what looked like signboards of some sort. The planet had never been very heavily populated. Though we found evidence of several towns and one major city, they'd been so thoroughly demolished that it was difficult to tell anything about them. It looked like the people had a fairly high technological level, from the few undestroyed artifacts I was able to dig up, but I didn't have time for more than a survey before the Jaffa attacked and I had to leave."

"The Jaffa attack must have been after I came in to truck out the first collection of artifacts," Pat commented. "Nobody was in the ruins but you."

"That's right--you drove that truck. I knew--once I woke up--that I'd met you before . . . before I thought you were. . . ." He looked down at the printouts in his hand as if they held some kind of answer to the dilemma.

"Yeah, I know." It _was_ too painful to discuss the 'you thought we were married and I was carrying your child' part with a man who was, actually, nearly a stranger. "Anyway, your thoughts on the symbols?" she said, to mercifully change the subject.

"Uh, yeah, uh, we only found symbols in the city, and then in only four places, quite close together. This biggest piece," he held up a printout showing what could have been a rather mangled sign board, with symbols in small groups centered down it, "was right on the edge of where I was digging. I found these others in the rubble." The other printouts showed what could also have been sign boards, all three different, but. . . .

"Oh, I see. The symbols are repeated. Each group on the small boards is found on the bigger one."

A grin lit Dr. Jackson's face. "Did they teach you to be that observant in officer training, or is that why they picked you for the SGC?" he asked.

Pat shrugged. "It's probably why I did well in officer training," she said. "I think they look at those who do well in training as possible candidates for the SGC. So probably the latter." Inside she was thinking, _Oh, the dimples again. I need to get this man to smile more often._

"So you see why I was excited about this. But there's no context for the print. We don't know if these are people's names, or businesses, or something else. Nothing is repeated on the big board, so I was thinking people's names. If they had an office building with, say, 'Dr. Jackson, dentist, Dr. Yancy, dentist' there might be some repetition. But then again maybe not. . . ." He stared again at the printouts as if perhaps now he could fathom something from them, then shook his head.

"In the short time I had, I found _no_ other writing. Not the tiniest scribble. No books, no graffiti, not even a scrap of paper with someone's shopping list. So you can see why I was frustrated."

"There's . . . there's no way to tell what the words are until you have some context for them?"

"That, or an other-world Rosetta Stone--an inscription in a language I recognize coupled with an inscription that says the same thing, but in this language."

Pat could see how this intrigued and frustrated him. No wonder he'd been wild to photograph the symbols in the ruins they'd found in the . . . experience.

"I would have had to leave even if Moloch hadn't sent his Jaffa to the planet. As soon as I established that the ruins weren't Ancient, the SGC lost interest and, in effect, I lost my funding." He grimaced.

Pat reached for one of the artifacts on his desk. She recognized it from when she'd been helping Dr. Jackson pack things into boxes to truck back to the SGC. It was a palm-sized smooth oval, a flattened egg shape with several shallow indentations--like a worry stone. She thought it might be ceramic, with an opalescent blue glaze, or maybe some kind of shiny plastic.

#

Pat snuggled into her pillow, pulling the covers up to her chin and enjoying the warmth and comfort. After a long day on base, nothing like coming home to sleep in her own bed, in her own house, with her own . . . _husband_?

The warm body against her back felt very good, but she tensed. No! This wasn't real, for all that it was homey and comfortable. She clenched her teeth, certain she was back in one of those 'adventures.' At least it wasn't freezing rain or stinking sheds this time. What would _Whoever_ do to her this time, if she was starting out the experience in her own warm bed?

However, it was _not_ her bed. She pushed herself up, squinting at the room and furnishings in the pale light coming in through filmy curtains at the window. Nothing like her own rather shabby, messy bedroom. More like something out of a magazine, where the bedspread and rug and curtains were all color coordinated and there weren't any soda cans or dirty socks or books open on their faces to show that a real person lived here. Or . . . _two_ real people.

Her _husband_ stirred and mumbled something, reaching for her to pull her back into his arms. She turned toward him and sighed. It was Dr. Jackson.

He smiled lazily up at her, and she admired his dimples, but then the smile turned to a look of alarm. "We're ba--" He started choking, and she leapt out of bed to run to the bathroom--why did she know where it was?--to get him a drink of water.

Why, _why_ hadn't she told him, while they were standing in his lab discussing the weird adventure they'd been through together, that what they said influenced the storyline?

He accepted the water gratefully, tried to speak again, and went into a coughing spasm. She shook her head at him, trying to tell him, 'Don't say anything.'

They sat next to one another on the bed, looking at each other and trying, without words, to communicate. Pat was glad, for the sake of her peace of mind, to note that she wore a nightgown and he had on pajama pants. It might be very hard to control herself--no, don't go there.

Daniel seemed to be trying very hard to think of something to say that wouldn't choke him up. Finally he said, "We have a very nice house, don't we?"

"Yes, much nicer than my old apartment," Pat answered.

"I'll like it better once I can get all my things moved in from my old house, though," he said.

A stupid conversation, especially for people who supposedly had been married long enough to have a baby on the way, but they did manage to communicate a bit obliquely there. It wasn't a facsimile of either of the places they really lived.

_Now what?_ Pat stared at Daniel, hoping he had some brilliant idea, because she was right out of them. If only she'd _told_ him, if only they had discussed the experience and what they could and couldn't do. If only he knew that they had to _die_ to get out of the trap--and that _Whoever_ wouldn't let them die easily.

Daniel's head went up and his lips parted as if he were about to speak. Then his face went blank as he stared off over her shoulder. She turned to look, but then decided he was just thinking. His lips firmed in that very determined way, and then his face relaxed into a smile. "Come, dear wife, let's go make breakfast."

_He thought of something_. She stood and followed Daniel into the interior-design-magazine idea of a kitchen. By now, the sun shone through the perky yellow print curtains. He waved her to a seat in the sparkling clean breakfast nook and deliberately closed the door into the hall. "I'll make you breakfast, dear." _Laying it on a bit heavy, aren't you?_ "It's a good thing we have a gas stove, isn't it? I never can get the eggs to cook right on an electric stove."

Relief washed over her in waves. _He figured it out. He knows that what he says will be true. Thank God!_ "I prefer gas stoves too," she reinforced what he'd said. "Especially old-fashioned gas stoves. The food turns out so much better." _Is he thinking what I think he's thinking? That sounds like a cartoon character. But it's a lot easier to get a natural gas leak in an __old__ gas stove._

He turned from where he was rummaging through cupboards and smiled at her. She took a deep breath. The dimples, and such blue, blue eyes. Was _Whoever_ influencing her emotions again, to make her heart flutter when he looked at her like that?

"As I said before, Pat--you're _good_." He pulled a heavy cast iron frying pan out of the cupboard, set it on a burner, and turned the stove knob to MED.

"We could do toast in the oven, too," Pat commented. She stood and took a loaf of twelve-grain bread from the decorator breadbox. She found a shiny cookie sheet in a cupboard and lay pieces of bread on it. "Do you want one piece or two?"

"Two, I think." His voice had the faintest of tremors in it. Nerves--or laughter at their trying so hard to sound 'normal?'

He had already melted butter in the pan, now he cracked six eggs in and stirred them with a fork. She put four pieces of bread on the cookie sheet, turned the oven to BROIL, and pushed the toast into the oven. After a few minutes she pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven with a designer hot pad, and turned the toast, golden on one side, to the untoasted side.

The eggs were done, and Daniel scooped them onto plates. Then he blew out the stove's flame, leaving the burner on.

Pat pulled the toast out and turned the oven off. She watched dispassionately as Daniel stooped and blew out the oven's pilot light, then she turned the oven back on to its highest setting, acting as if this was the way one always used gas ovens. She buttered the toast and took it over to the table in the breakfast nook.

Daniel stood in the breakfast nook, staring outside as he leaned on the frames to assure that the three windows were shut tight.

"Orange juice, dear?" asked Pat brightly.

"Yes, that would be nice," Daniel answered, sounding a bit distracted.

Pat found a pitcher of orange juice in the amazingly well stocked refrigerator, and deliberately slopped some onto the floor in front of the door to the hall. "Darn," she said, grabbing a designer hand towel from its loop and dropping it on the spill. With her foot, she pushed the towel to block the crack under the door, then took the juice to the table.

The distinctive odor added to natural gas was becoming noticeable in the kitchen. Heart hammering, Pat found silverware, glasses, and napkins, and set the table. She sat down next to Daniel, and couldn't help slipping her hand into his. It was one thing, in the middle of intense action, to make a deliberate jump into the Stargate's kawoosh; it was quite another to plan deliberate cold-blooded suicide that could take hours. When she'd contemplated putting the pistol in her mouth and pulling the trigger, she'd known she wasn't the type for suicide. This long-drawn-out suicide plan was even tougher than the sudden death she'd thought of before. And it was hard--very hard--to act normal for an unseen watcher while setting up suicide.

Pushing thoughts of slow death to the back of her mind, Pat found that she was actually hungry. Daniel was too, and the eggs, toast and juice were soon gone. "Thanks for cooking," she told Daniel.

"My pleasure. Would you hand me the newspaper?"

Sure enough, there was a folded newspaper on the end of the table. Daniel opened it and disappeared behind it. Pat got up and put the dishes in the sink. She hated washing dishes, and didn't want to do it in a non reality, even though she needed a reason to hang around in the kitchen. Finally she went back to the breakfast nook and peeled part of the newspaper away from Daniel, then held it in front of her, not reading.

What did asphyxiation by natural gas feel like? From what she could remember reading, it was painless--not like carbon monoxide poisoning, which caused headaches and nausea and all kinds of other nastiness. Basically, it replaced the oxygen, and once they'd used up all the oxygen in the air there was nothing to breathe.

If they were trying to use up the oxygen in the kitchen, they ought to do something energetic. Would _Whoever_ think it odd that a young married couple wanted to do jumping jacks or pushups after breakfast? She could think of something else energetic that she wouldn't mind doing with Daniel, but she would not let _Whoever_ watch her do _that_!

She dropped the newspaper, got up from the table, and started rummaging through cupboards, scrubbing the already spotless counter tops, and sweeping the floor.

Daniel raised his eyebrows at her over the newspaper. Then his face lit with an _ah ha!_ look and he got up to help. He washed the dishes she'd dumped in the sink. "Nothing like a lazy Saturday morning, is there?" he asked.

It was weird. In the other experience she'd been able to talk to Daniel normally, naturally, because he didn't know what was going on. But now that they both knew, she couldn't think of anything to say. She ached to discuss what was happening, but couldn't. And she couldn't easily play along with the fiction that she was Daniel's wife, either. So they worked side by side, occasionally saying something mundane and boring, but mostly in a--to her--awkward silence.

When Pat started panting while doing the simple task of replacing the bag in the trash can, she went back to the breakfast nook and leaned her cheek against the sun-warmed window.

A feeder outside had attracted a pair of cardinals and some kind of bird with a showy yellow head and beady black eyes. She pointed them out to Daniel, and he sat down next to her and blinked at the birds.

Pat tried not to panic at the shortness of breath; she wouldn't let herself take huge gulping breaths. She had to keep reminding herself that this was _not_ real, that she and Daniel would be back in the SGC as soon as the gas did what they wanted it to do--suffocate them to death in this experience.

Dizzy and disoriented by now, Pat leaned her head sleepily against Daniel's shoulder. He squeezed her hand. "You are amazing," he said, the words seeming to come from very far away.

"Speak . . . for . . . yourself," she said, spacing the words out, as it took so long to think of what to say next and to gather the air to say them. The last thing she remembered was the little quiver of new life--a life that wasn't real--fluttering in her abdomen.

#

Pat dropped the artifact she'd been holding and it shattered on the concrete floor of Daniel's lab. She leaned over his desk, palms flat to support herself, gasping. Daniel's arm, warm and comforting, dropped around her shoulders.

"Thank God you figured it out," she said, words tumbling over one another in an effort to get them out before something else happened. "We never talked about 'what the hell _happened_ to us?' and I never told you what I figured out. What we say is real. What we say makes the story. _Whoever_ does it to us doesn't want us to die, or the story ends. Suffer--yes. _Whoever_ seems to enjoy the suffering. Die--no." She took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering near-moan.

Daniel set her in the desk chair and leaned in to peer into her eyes. "It . . . it hit me when I couldn't talk about it, and I remembered you having that choking fit. And then I realized that you had gone to a lot of effort to . . . well, to get us _killed_ by jumping into the kawoosh. But that brought us out of it, back here to the SGC. So . . . we had to die, and not let on that we were doing it."

"Clever to think of the old gas stove, and asphyxiating from natural gas.

"Clever to catch on so fast."

They smiled at each other. Pat tried to ignore the dimples and the blue eyes. "So, what caused it the first time? It _had_ to be that thing I just broke this time--didn't it?"

Daniel snagged a chair from the other side of the room, set it facing her, and sat down. His brow furrowed, and he bit his lips. "It would seem so," he said slowly. "God, I wish I could ask Sam. But she's down at Area 51 checking out a problem the scientists there had with some Goa'uld technology. That's why I was working on the artifacts. Kind of a vacation." A little smile.

"Okay, the only other time I touched the artifacts was when we were packing them up to bring them back here." Pat frowned, trying to remember if anything had happened. "I brought the boxes over, you handed me stuff and told me how to pack it, and I did. Then we carried the boxes back to the truck."

"We were the only two on the planet that day," Daniel said, tipping his head and glancing up in a _remembering_ look. "I took all my paperwork back the day before, and General Hammond sent the rest of the team to PX9-757, so I went back to get the artifacts with only you and the truck."

"But that was two weeks ago. Why did this happen last night instead of then?"

Daniel shrugged. "I have no idea. I'd like to go over all the artifacts again."

"Let's tell someone, first. If that happens again. . . ."

"Yeah," Daniel drew the word out in a long, thoughtful sound. "Uh, since Sam isn't available, maybe Janet--Dr. Fraiser. No, it's four in the morning. Somebody will be there in the infirmary, but I'd rather discuss this with Janet. We'll have to wait 'til morning, and then call her. She'll be at home with Cassie, since it's the weekend."

He stood, then stooped to pick up the pieces of the artifact Pat had dropped.

"I don't think you ought to--" began Pat, reaching out to stop him.

"Should be okay," Daniel said, gathering the pieces in his hand. "It's broken now."

#

The bone-chilling cold of passage through a wormhole took Pat's breath away. She was still too new to the SGC for this to be routine, and was half scared of the process--though she'd never admit that to anyone. But after what seemed forever in the strangeness of molecular compression, she stepped out onto another planet.

With the odd 'slurp' of something exiting the event horizon, Daniel came through just behind her. They were both clad in full uniform--BDUs, vest, and P-90, as well as a heavy rucksack. She carried a pick and shovel; he had several rugged cases and a video camera.

Daniel's eyes were alight with excitement. "Finally! I never thought we'd get enough down time from our other missions that we could come back here and search those ruins."

Pat groaned inwardly and clenched her fists. What now? This _had_ to be another of those adventures. But this time, it was something Daniel would not _want_ to leave. He had obviously been aching for a chance to learn more about those unknown symbols. Had _Whoever_ learned from them as they'd been learning how to thwart _Whoever_? Daniel wasn't acting like he thought this was one of those 'adventures.' Had _Whoever_ fooled him into thinking this was a real mission? Then why didn't _she_ think it was real?

She shook her head. She'd said it herself, two 'adventures' back--_Archaeologist Heaven_. Not her field--she had started out as an electronics tech.

"Come on, Pat." Daniel started down the steps, and for the first time Pat took a look at her surroundings. The Stargate was set in a fairly open area scattered with clumps of grass and bushes, straggling into forest about half a mile away.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Surrounding the Stargate were scattered crates--and she'd seen those crates before--twice.


	6. Chapter 6: City

Sorry for being so long to add this new section. Things like college starting, car shopping, and other "life" happenings have conspired to keep me from writing. But it's here at last! And Daniel gets to be "Daniel-y."

# # #

Section 6: City

Pat dropped her pick and shovel and brought up her P-90, running crouched to put the Stargate between herself and the crates--those same crates that had concealed men with rifles twice in their first experience. Daniel kept on, oblivious to danger, and Pat winced. _Whoever_ wouldn't let him get killed, she was sure of that. But _Whoever_ might not be very happy with her and Daniel right now, and she knew what kinds of experiences _Whoever_ seemed to relish putting them through.

Daniel must have realized she wasn't with him, for he turned back and called, "Pat?" He was standing in plain sight amidst the jumble of crates, and so far nothing had happened. Was _Whoever_ playing with her again?

"If SG-3 and SG-10 didn't clean out all the pothunters, General Hammond will have their hides," Daniel said. "I don't think you need to worry."

Pothunters? "You can never be too careful," Pat answered, straightening from her crouch and coming around the Stargate. She still had her rifle out and continued to scan the area for movement. "You know what happened here before." She was relieved that she could say it without choking. She supposed that _Whoever_ would allow them to discuss earlier experiences when in later ones--as long as they didn't stray into the taboo subjects of 'this isn't real' and 'we can change the story.'

"What's in those crates, anyway?" she asked, since Daniel seemed to have some information in this experience that she didn't.

"Artifacts the pothunters were stealing," Daniel called back over his shoulder. He seemed eager to get to wherever he was going. "I'll look them over later, but without their provenience they're a lot less valuable to me. When Teal'c questioned the pothunters they said there wasn't writing on anything."

Pat sighed and stowed her P-90 back on its clip across her chest. She stooped, retrieved the pick and shovel, and followed Daniel off through the brush toward the forest.

It was fairly early in the morning, local time, for it was light but the sun was hidden behind a bank of clouds on past the Stargate, and there was frost on the ground between the clumps of grass and bushes. Daniel's footprints were very plain in the frost; if anyone else had been through recently, they would have left footprints as well, and there were none. That cheered Pat slightly.

The racket of morning bird song ceased as she and Daniel entered the forest; another good sign. The birds would already have been scared into silence if there had been anyone else in the forest.

Now that Pat wasn't running for her life, she had time to study the trees. They were very similar to ones she knew on Earth--elms, maples, sycamores, cottonwoods, aspens and more. A bluish tint to their leaves was the major difference. Why they were all in full leaf while it was still so cold was a mystery to her; maybe this _was_ high summer in this place. In that case, she hoped never to visit in the winter.

Daniel crashed through the forest's undergrowth without bothering to be quiet. Pat, following him, was hindered by the pick and shovel she carried and had to duck under branches he pushed aside with the hand carrying only the video camera.

"Daniel--" she began, and stopped when a deep, throaty growl sounded off to her right. "What was that?"

He stopped, suddenly more alert. He licked his lips and stared around.

"To the right," Pat whispered.

Daniel carefully set the cases he carried on the ground and gestured Pat to his side. She leaned the pick and shovel against a tree and moved up, taking care with every step not to break twigs or crackle the undergrowth. While Daniel scanned the forest around them, she unclipped her P-90.

Leaves rustled. Daniel held up a hand in a 'wait' gesture as Pat found a good stance and brought her rifle up to her shoulder.

Pat had seen pictures of the creature that stepped out from between two trees, but the reality was far larger, more solid and intimidating than she'd ever imagined. Tall as Daniel, with tough-looking brownish-green hide and two small curved horns on its chin, this was undoubtedly an Unas. It cocked its head, staring at the two of them. It smelled musky, like crushed herbs.

"Let me deal with him," Daniel whispered. Without moving, he said, "A cha'ka" in a guttural tone far from his normal speaking voice.

The Unas opened its--his?--eyes wide. "A cha'ka," it said, drawing the words out in an even more guttural voice than Daniel had used. It somehow managed to sound surprised.

"Te Daniel," Daniel said, pointing to himself. "Te Pat." Now he pointed at her, and it was all she could do to stand still, not really wanting the thing's attention on her.

"Dan'al," the Unas said, drawing the word out long and seeming to taste it. "Bat."

It advanced a step closer, and Daniel whispered, "Stand still. We don't want to seem aggressive, but we don't want to give ground, either."

Pat gulped, gave the tiniest of nods, and kept peering at the Unas through the sights of her rifle. At point-blank range, she could at least wound it before it savaged her and Daniel.

But the alien wasn't necessarily a threat, for all its war-like demeanor. Daniel had worked with Unas before. They weren't unreasoning beasts, and he spoke a little of their language. If she remembered correctly from her briefings, the fact that this Unas had a relatively smooth face and very small horns on its chin meant it was a young adult. She hoped it wouldn't do something rash, as an Earth teenager might.

Daniel and the Unas spoke for a while, and Pat's arm started trembling from supporting the rifle. "Should I put this down?" she asked quietly.

It took Daniel a few moments to respond. "Uh, yeah, lower it very slowly and keep your hands in sight. He's curious, but still on his guard."

When Pat moved, the Unas raised four-fingered hands with impressively long claws, and growled something. It was hard for Pat to understand the Unas's guttural language, even words she'd heard Daniel say, but after the Unas had repeated this one three times, she thought she had it. "Kekata." Whatever that meant.

_Ah geez,_ Pat thought. _I know this Unas won't kill me--this isn't real!--but I really don't want to do the pain thing again._ Those claws were long, and sharp, and far too close to her for her comfort.

Daniel took a step forward, saying, "Ka kek!"

The Unas hunched a bit, pulling his claws back, and Daniel went into another long recital of language heavy in 'k' sounds.

Pat continued to lower her P-90 until she was cradling it to her chest. If she needed to, she could bring it up again quickly, although her aim would be pathetic. But at this range, that shouldn't be a problem--unless this Unas had a lot of its kin around.

However, Daniel seemed to have come to some kind of understanding with the Unas. They growled away at one another while Pat scanned the forest all around, flinching at every noise that might be a bigger, meaner Unas coming to see where junior was.

Finally Daniel touched her on the shoulder and said something else to the Unas. The youngster hunched his shoulders again, then straightened and trotted off into the forest. "Come on," Daniel told Pat. "He's taking us to where the 'old living places' are. I assume that means ruins--and it sounds like it's more than the one building we found earlier. This is probably where the pothunters were looting artifacts."

Pat followed, but she didn't like the way this was going. _Is it because this is an adventure where __Daniel__ is more in his element, and I'm not? Or is it just that, even after all our discussion, he doesn't seem to know this is just another of those unreal adventures?_

Her uneasiness increased as, all around them in the forest, she heard furtive movement--as if they were being shadowed, unseen, by those theoretical Unas kin she had hoped wouldn't join the negotiations. As they got deeper into the forest, she caught occasional glimpses of the leathery-skinned creatures, dressed in skins decorated with bones, and carrying nasty-looking spears. They ghosted along between the trees making much less noise than she and Daniel did.

Pat hurried to catch up with the archaeologist. "Um, Daniel, we've got company," she said in a low voice. "A bunch more of your friends surrounding us in the trees."

Daniel didn't appear concerned. "That will be Leska's tribe. I'm hoping they'll help us if we have any heavy lifting when we get to the ruins."

"You're going to get the Unas to help with your dig?" Pat was incredulous. "You don't know anything about these Unas, even if you have talked to some on other planets." She stopped herself from saying anything more, remembering just in time that what she said would probably come true.

"Leska was very curious about us and what we're here to do. I imagine his tribe will be as inquisitive as he is," Daniel said serenely, pushing hanging branches out of the way with the hand still holding the video camera.

Pat felt a bit better. If Daniel stated it would be okay, it should be. _Should_ be. She still wasn't sure of the rules of these crazy adventures.

Her arms were getting tired from holding the tools, which weren't heavy but their handles kept catching in the branches and underbrush. The exercise was keeping her plenty warm in the cold air; she was starting to sweat under the straps of her heavy rucksack. She wanted to ask, like a small child on a car ride, _Are we there yet?_

Finally they broke through a heavy screen of branches. The forest thinned into brush and clumps of grass covering a hill sloping downward from where they stood.

Pat couldn't help her gasp. Below them a city stretched for miles, the buildings mostly roofless and their walls broken, with trees growing up where streets had been. Most of the walls were an obsidian-like black material, glistening in the sunlight where it wasn't covered with dirt.

Daniel let out a long, happy sigh. "A _city_! So Leska wasn't exaggerating. It was hard to tell--his description wasn't very exact, and I don't know that much of the language, really. I doubt the Unas built this--that's not their style. I wonder what happened to the humans? Were they brought here and then abandoned by the Goa'uld, or were they an independent civilization? On P3R-118 the civilization was thoroughly destroyed by the Goa'uld, but here. . . ." he pursed his lips, staring down at the ruins. The rapt look on his face was almost as appealing as his grin.

Pat couldn't answer any of his questions, but she had to admit that the sight was impressive. She could almost understand his fascination with archaeology as she looked down at the ruined city. She didn't say anything, though, for she wasn't sure how this city would figure in the 'adventure' they were currently in.

The young Unas stood partway down the hillside, gesturing from Daniel to the city and back again. Pat sensed, rather than saw, other Unas still hidden among the trees behind them.

Just as Daniel was starting down the hill toward the young Unas--Leska--Pat spotted movement across the valley. A party of Unas were coming out of the trees two-thirds of the way around the city from them.

Pat grabbed Daniel's arm. "Look. More Unas. Do you think they're from your friend's tribe?"

Daniel frowned. "So _that's_ what he was trying to tell me. No, I don't think those Unas are from his tribe. I think he was telling me that another tribe claims the ruins, and I'd have to negotiate with them."

Leska ran back up the hill toward them. Another growling discussion ensued. Daniel pulled an energy bar out of his pocket and gave it to Leska, who turned it over and over in his big clawed hands. Daniel got another one out, showed Leska how to unwrap it, and took a bite. "This usually works pretty well," he confided, low-voiced, to Pat.

The young Unas awkwardly peeled the wrapper off his bar--his claws got in the way--and took a bite. His eyes widened, and he ate the rest quickly.

"I'd say he likes it," Daniel said, grinning. He handed the one he'd bitten to the young Unas, who accepted it happily.

"Um, Daniel," Pat said, "those other Unas are already in the city--they're moving fast." She unclipped her P-90, watching the nine Unas trotting purposefully between ruined buildings, obviously heading their way. She, Daniel, and the young Unas must be rather obvious at the valley's rim, just outside the forest.

Leska tensed, shoulders hunching, and looked uneasily at Pat's P-90. Then he followed her gaze and saw the other Unas approaching rapidly. He said something to Daniel in his own language, and raced into the forest.

"Yeah," Daniel said. "Leska said--I think--that his tribe doesn't get on well with the one that claims the ruins. We'll be better off trying to negotiate with them if he's not with us."

"Maybe he just wants us to shoot up the other tribe so his can have the ruins," Pat said sardonically. She wondered if she could get Daniel and herself killed in a battle between two tribes of Unas. Chancy. More likely they'd get torn to ribbons and have to live with the pain. _Whoever_ seemed to like it when she and Daniel were in pain.

"Don't worry about it," Daniel said, starting purposefully down the hill. "I'll talk to them."

Pat winced and followed him, keeping her P-90 at hand--which was awkward, as she was still carrying the pick and shovel.

The way they followed had once been a road, so the prickly bushes and tall clumps of grass were fewer. Pat still found it hard to keep from stumbling, for the hill was steep and the edges of shattered paving poked from the ground in unexpected places. Daniel stopped before they reached the first building, standing and waiting for the Unas. Pat moved to his side, dropped the pick and shovel, and readied her P-90.

Eight of the Unas spread out in a half circle around Pat and Daniel, putting rubble and broken walls between them and the two humans. The ninth, holding a spear before him, came forward to confront Daniel. He was burly, his hide ridged, the horns on his chin long and curved. His rather attractive leather jacket was stitched all over with odd bits and pieces likely scavenged from the ruins.

"Probably the alpha male," Daniel whispered to Pat, keeping his gaze on the Unas. "Don't move--leave this to me."

"And if it goes bad?" Pat murmured.

"Shoot first, then run like hell."

Daniel stepped forward to meet the leader, his hands out to his sides, open and empty. He growled "A cha'ka" at the Unas. The Unas's eyes widened and he shook his spear at Daniel.

Pat gripped her rifle a little harder, but Daniel seemed unperturbed. He said something else, interspersing occasional English words--probably when he didn't know the word in the Unas language--and stepped closer to the Unas.

The Unas bridled, shaking his spear again, but Daniel kept talking. Pat had to admire his . . . was it bravery, or just sheer scientific single-mindedness?

"They're not real crazy about humans right now," Daniel whispered. "The pothunters shot at them and stole things from their ruins."

"So maybe we ought to come back again later, when they're not so down on us?" _Fat chance._

"No, I'm getting through to him, I think. Problem is, he saw me give something to Leska, so he not only suspects me of being a pothunter, but of being a spy for Leska's tribe. At least I _think_ that's what he was saying."

"So, can we outrun their spears? This does _not_ sound good."

"It shouldn't come to that. I'm talking him around."

Daniel reached slowly and carefully for his belt. He unbuckled it and removed a small sheathed knife from where it was attached to the belt. After another spate of guttural talking, he held it out to the Unas leader.

The Unas leaned forward warily, and his companions shifted their spears.

"Ko kekata," Daniel said, moving the knife closer to the leader.

"Ko?" the leader growled.

"Ko," Daniel stated emphatically.

The Unas took the knife and turned it over and over in his huge clawed hands, obviously unsure what it was.

Daniel mimed taking the knife out of the sheath. The leader cocked his head, looking comically perplexed. Then his eyes widened and he slipped the knife from the sheath. He turned it this way and that, admiring how the sun glinted off the steel. "A ka!"

The Unas slipped the knife into his jacket. He paused, then jerked one of the decorations off his jacket and held it out. "Ko."

Daniel took it, turning it over in his hand as the Unas had his knife. "A ka." He put it in his pocket.

The gift exchange over, it seemed Daniel was making more headway with the Unas. He growled and gestured, and though Pat still wanted to wince every time the Unas waved a clawed hand at Daniel, the Unas now seemed less menacing.

"Gaa!" Daniel murmured in an aside to Pat. "I'm trying to tell him I don't want to take anything out of the ruins, but just make videos. But how to explain _videos_ to an Unas?"

Pat shrugged, then froze as the spear-wielding Unas of the retinue turned their attention to her. "Record them and play it back on the preview screen," she whispered. "I bet they'd be fascinated to see themselves on video."

"Good idea!" Daniel held up the video camera. Immediately the leader pointed his spear at Daniel, and the others raised their weapons and stepped nearer. "No, it's not a weapon!" Daniel said, then something else--probably a translation of what he'd said in English--in Unas.

By the time Daniel seemed to get the Unas to understand what he wanted, Pat's shoulders and neck had stiffened up from holding them so tense. Daniel recorded the leader leaning in to stare directly into the camera's lens, then backing up with a puzzled expression on his face. Daniel slowly brought the camera down, then turned it to show the Unas the playback of what he had recorded.

The bewildered, excited, unbelieving look the Unas gave the recording of himself was amusing to watch. Daniel told him something in his language, and the Unas gestured to his companions. They came warily out from behind their shielding rubble piles to peer at the playback.

Before long they were all hamming it up for the video recorder, like a bunch of kids at a birthday party. Pat relaxed, fairly sure the Unas were no longer a threat. At this rate, Daniel would make himself popular enough that they might let him bring artifacts out of the ruins, as well as video.

She was about to clip her P-90 back against her chest when she saw movement in her peripheral vision. She turned her head to see, above them on the hill, a large group of Unas coming out of the shelter of the forest. She didn't think Daniel's 'friend' from earlier was among them--they all had the long chin horns and rough, ribbed hides of older Unas. The group jumped and hooted, brandishing spears and sticks bristling with sharp pieces of stone.

"Um, Daniel, I think we have a problem," she said breathlessly, raising her P-90 again.

He looked up from where he was showing the city Unas their latest recordings. "Oh, this shouldn't be a problem," he said. "I talked to Leska, after all. His tribe is just showing their strength--"

He cut off as the Unas he had just been recording, who had been friendly and interested a moment before, grabbed their weapons and started hooting and jumping around like those who were coming down the hillside.

"Daniel, I hate to shake your faith in your Unas friends," Pat said, her voice quavering just slightly, "but have you noticed that the two of us are right between two bunches of spear-wielding aliens?"

"Yeah," he said under his breath, "I noticed." He called something in the Unas language, but neither of the groups paid any attention.

The uphill group was closer now, and the city Unas had crowded together behind Pat and Daniel. Their musky odor, pleasant before, became almost overpowering.

Daniel bit his lip, looking indecisive, then grabbed Pat's arm and said, "Uh, I think running away would work really well right now."

A spear, thrown by one of the Unas halfway down the hill, flew past Pat's head. In her peripheral vision Pat could see that the city Unas easily sidestepped it, and their growling became louder and their posturing more frenetic.

As Daniel stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body, one of the Unas behind them flung a spear back at Leska's tribe. The spear's sharp stone head sliced through Pat's sleeve and the muscle of her upper arm in a burst of hot pain. _Damn it! __Whoever__ is starting with the adventures and pain again!_ This was exactly what she'd been thinking earlier, that she wouldn't want to be caught between two tribes of warring Unas. Was _Whoever_ even reading her thoughts now?

# # #

Okay, in case you never learned Unas from watching "The First Ones," "Beast of Burden," or "Enemy Mine," here's what the Unas words mean:

A cha'ka--a general greeting, hello

A ka--thank you

Ka kek--you don't have to kill

Kekata--weapon

Ko--give

Te--I am


	7. Chapter 7: Archaeology

Wow. Sorry for the embarrassingly long wait. Real life happened once again, and then it was NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month--November), where I wrote 60,666 words of a novel (it's not finished yet, but I'm working on it). So I decided to take a break from the novel and finish this story! So here it is. More Daniel being Daniel-y. And other fun stuff. . . . I promise the next (and final) chapter will be up in a few days.

# # #

Section 7: Archaeology

Daniel, standing in front of Pat, must not have seen the spear slash her arm. He reached for his pistol, holstered on his right thigh, and said, "Shoot into the air, Pat. That should startle them, and we can escape this feud before it gets worse."

Carefully _not_ looking at her right arm, though she felt blood soaking her sleeve, she lifted her P-90. She bit her lip at the pain in her upper arm, but braced the weapon with the muzzle pointing upward, released the safety, and fired. The _crack_ of the rifle was echoed by the sharper report of Daniel's pistol, and she gasped as the recoil jolted her arm. When Daniel jerked her away from the now-agitated Unas she drew in a hiss of pain as she half-fell into Daniel and again jarred her wound.

At the sound of gunshots the Unas coming down the hill stopped precipitously, nearly piling up against one another like Keystone Kops. Those from the city circled Daniel and Pat, shaking their spears and yelling things that Pat, of course, couldn't understand. Daniel yelled back, and Pat crouched at his feet, rifle at the ready. She was starting to feel dizzy. Was she that badly wounded?

Maybe she was. There was way too much blood soaking into the dirt next to her. She tried to stand, and grabbed Daniel's leg for support when another wave of dizziness swirled darkness across her vision.

He looked down at her. "Are you okay, Pat-- Oh!" Ignoring the Unas clustering around them, he knelt beside her. "Wha--?"

"When that first Unas threw his spear, it. . . ." she held her arm up to show him, swallowing hard when she saw how much blood soaked her sleeve and dripped to the ground.

"Oh, my God," Daniel said. He immediately started rummaging in the pockets of his vest. "I know there are bandages--no, antibiotic first--where are the stupid things?"

The Unas surrounding them shook their spears and growled something. Daniel yelled, "Look what you did! Now shut up and let me take care of her."

Though the Unas couldn't understand his words, they obviously realized he was angry. The leader growled something and most of them turned, advanced on the other group of Unas, and resumed their leaping about and spear-shaking. The leader stooped to look at Pat's arm, and Daniel said something to him in Unas.

Daniel carefully slid the straps of the rucksack off her arm, then even more carefully removed her vest and uniform jacket. Pat stared in fascination at the long cut on her bicep. Daniel found the antibiotic and after carefully blotting the blood, he applied it to the edges of the wound. "I wish I could stitch this," he muttered, "but I'd rather leave that to the doctors back at the SGC. This'll have to do for now." He pulled out a roll of bandage and started winding it around her arm.

The Unas leader growled something, reaching a huge clawed finger to gently touch Pat's arm near the wound. Daniel growled back, then said in English, "Yeah, we're thin skinned and bleed easily."

More unintelligible Unas language. Daniel answered, "Our blood is a funny color, yes. But it's still blood."

As Daniel finished binding the wound Pat rummaged one-handed through the pockets of the vest on the ground beside her and pulled out an energy bar to eat. Didn't they always want you to eat and drink after you gave blood? This was surely a similar situation.

She was determined to stand up and go on, now that the cut was taken care of, but when she started to push herself up Daniel whispered, "Are you feeling better?" She nodded. "Can you pretend to be more badly injured than you are? Monak here says he and his warriors will take you to a healing place, now that they've successfully driven off the interlopers." He gently eased her to the ground.

Her arm was starting to throb, but she thought she could get up if she had to. "He told you that?" she asked.

"Uh, I think so. That's the gist of it."

"Do you trust an Unas to heal a human?"

"I don't think we need to go that far. I just want to see the ruins--and they're taking you into one of the buildings, I think Monak said. Then we'll get you back to the Stargate. Uh, you are okay, really? Because we could go back to the Stargate now, and I'll come back to look at the ruins later."

Worry creased his forehead, and she thought rather dizzily that he was even appealing when he looked like that. She wished she could tell him that this wasn't real, that she'd be okay no matter what, that a little pain here was what _Whoever_ seemed to want anyway. "Yeah, I'm fine--really, Daniel. Don't miss out on your ruins."

Daniel dropped his rucksack, stripped off his vest, and took off his own uniform jacket. "I'll cover you with this--your jacket is too bloody. I don't want you going into shock." He turned to the Unas crouching next to him and started talking in the Unas language.

The Unas--Monak, she assumed--rose to his feet and said something to the rest of his group, who had returned from intimidating the forest Unas and were standing in a loose circle around Pat and Daniel. All nine set off, looking purposeful.

"Where are they going?" Pat asked.

"Um, I described a stretcher, and how to use it. They seemed intrigued with the idea."

_Stretcher?_ "Is that necessary?"

"I want you to seem injured enough to need it," Daniel said, sounding apologetic. "I'm sure you'll be okay. I'll be right next to you." He shrugged and grimaced, then took her hand. "I thought this would be a simple archaeological dig, and you'd enjoy coming with me. I should know by now that nothing is ever simple when the Stargate is involved."

_No_, thought Pat. Her thoughts came slowly, as if through jello. Blue jello. _Nothing is simple in __these stupid adventures__. If the Unas hadn't done this, I'm sure the ruins would have collapsed on us or something._

The sounds of Unas voices, scuffling footsteps, and then Daniel let go of her hand and said, "Okay, we're going to get you onto this . . . uh . . . stretcher."

Two of the Unas approached, carrying what looked like a door, or a piece of wall--from the ruins, perhaps? How solid was it, after all these years? Would it crumble to dust under her weight? They dropped it to the ground with a reassuringly solid thump.

Large, oddly warm hands lifted her, avoiding her throbbing arm as they moved her onto their improvised stretcher. After a moment of confusion, with Daniel calling suggestions, two Unas took the front and two the back, and raised the board gently. They set off through the ruins with a surprisingly smooth gait, Daniel striding alongside. Pat managed to relax, lie quietly, and not grasp the edges of the board with a death grip.

She thought the Unas had already cleared a path through the ruins; perhaps they lived in some of the old buildings. Certainly they weren't tripping over debris as they carried her along.

Several other Unas joined their group as they moved deeper into the ruined city. Pat kept her head down and tried to hide her curiosity--she was supposed to be badly wounded, not gawking at the Unas and the ruins.

Daniel had his video camera out and slowly panned it across the ruins as he followed the Unas carrying Pat's stretcher. To his credit, he did glance often at Pat, to assure the Unas weren't tipping her off their plank. She imagined that the video would be bumpy, and hoped it would still help Daniel in his research. _Except this isn't real. What can Daniel learn in a place that's not real?_

Through half-closed eyes she watched him. His eager interest and quick intelligence were very attractive; she had a hard time imagining him this animated about, say, sports or cars. Not the kind of man she normally worked with in the military.

It didn't take long for the Unas to convey her to a place in the ruins. The open doorway was broad enough for them to carry her improvised stretcher through without touching either door post.

Daniel followed them in, and his gasp was loud enough for her to hear over the deep growls of the Unas inside. Pat wished she dared turn her head, but she was still pretending, for the Unas, to be badly wounded. Even with her eyes half open she could see that she had been carried into a cavernous room, windows at least two storeys up letting in the planet's wintry sunlight, and the walls covered with the symbols Daniel had been so desperate to find.

"Wow," Daniel said, drawing it out into a long, almost prayerful sound. Then he muttered in a commonsense voice, "Good thing I brought extra batteries for the video camera."

The Unas carried Pat on, through another doorway they had to negotiate carefully to keep from tipping her off the plank, into a much smaller, darker room. She tensed, fearing a stinking den, but the odor inside, though rather strong, was only the musty herbal smell of the Unas.

The strong, warm hands of the Unas lifted her off the board to a softer surface--some sort of fur she guessed by the tickle against her skin and the animal smell of it.

Daniel followed them, growling questions in their language. Another smell, astringent and herbal. "I tried their potion on a cut on my finger," Daniel whispered, "and it seems to be fine. Shouldn't harm you, anyway." Pat hoped _Whoever_ was listening to that statement.

She was feeling better now--either the rest or the food must be helping--and her head wasn't as muzzy. As one of the Unas gently unwrapped the bandage from her arm and slathered on some cool concoction realization struck her. She hadn't been trying to influence this 'adventure' at all. She'd been considering it Daniel's adventure, hoping he would turn it the way _he_ wanted it. Well he had, to a point, but she could influence it too. Hadn't Daniel's statements been acted on in 'her' adventures?

"Oh, that feels good!" she said, and couldn't help but be surprised when it was true. The pain of the long slash in her arm disappeared, along with the muscle aches from carrying her rucksack and the tools through the forest. She closed her eyes, savoring the wash of relief.

"My God!" Daniel exclaimed, and Pat opened her eyes again, afraid that something horrible had happened. With some trepidation she turned her head to look at her exposed arm. The long slash was nothing but a pink line. She opened and closed her hand, flexing the muscles, and felt no pain.

"It's . . . it's healed. The Unas _do_ have powerful medicine," Pat whispered. She pushed herself up, twisting her arm this way and that. "Thank you!" she told the Unas. "Thank you!"

"A ka!" Daniel echoed her, and the Unas clustered around her all growled their--to Pat--unintelligible answers.

Monak, the alpha male, touched Daniel's arm gently and mimed the video camera. "Uh, Pat, why don't you stay here and rest for awhile? Monak wants me to video him again--and I really want to get the rest of the symbols on the walls out there. Will you be okay on your own?"

"I think so," Pat said uncertainly. Daniel had set her vest, P-90 and rucksack down on the glassy black floor nearby; she could probably reach her weapon before any of the Unas could harm her, if that was their intention. Somehow she didn't think it was.

"Great." Daniel followed Monak out, and Pat lay back down. Two smaller Unas fussed over her, covering her with furs like those she lay on and offering her rather improbable vessels containing things that might be food and drink. She didn't want to taste anything they brought her. What had Daniel said that meant 'no'? "Ka," she tried, and they hunched their shoulders and looked crestfallen.

She wondered if these were Unas women--they didn't have the big horns on their chins. Since she didn't want to hurt their feelings or offend them, she picked up one of the oddly shaped vessels they had brought in. It had been, perhaps, broken off some larger piece of equipment and beaten into a bowl shape with a stone.

"That was clever, to make something useful out of an old broken thing," she told them, trying to sound friendly and admiring. She knew they wouldn't understand, but hoped this way they'd know she wasn't angry with them. She picked up the other artifact. It looked like a cup or mug, rather lopsided but a pretty color. In fact, it reminded her of something. That opalescent blue glaze was very like the worry-stone thing which, she thought, had set off all these 'adventures.'

She stroked the smooth sides of the mug, and pointed. "Pretty. It's a pretty color. Do you know where more things like this are?"

The looks on the Unas's faces were amusingly quizzical. They said things back to her, and she shrugged, then stroked the mug again. "See, it's smooth, and pretty, and colorful. Do you know where other things like this are? Colored like this?" She thought a moment, then dug into her left-hand pants pocket and pulled out a colorful plastic keychain. She slipped the key off and dropped it back into her pocket, then held the keychain out. "Colorful, smooth, kinda like this."

Shoulders hunched doubtfully, the biggest of the two Unas reached for the keychain. Pat set it into the Unas's big clawed hand.

The Unas turned the keychain over and over, showing it to the other Unas and exclaiming. Pat grinned. They couldn't know it, but the keychain showed Happy Bunny, and said, "It would be neat if you were smart."

Pat ran her fingers over the mug's smooth side one more time, and the Unas did the same on the plastic of the keychain. _Come on, __Whoever__, that should be enough._

The second Unas ran a finger over the keychain too, and said something to the first Unas. That started what looked, to Pat, like an argument. Finally, the first Unas reached out and gently touched Pat's left arm, then turned and started out of the room. Pat scrambled up out of the bed, only slightly dizzy, and followed--remembering at the last second to grab her rather blood-stained belongings.

Daniel and the warrior Unas were nowhere to be seen when Pat got out into the bigger room with its symbol-decorated walls. She didn't worry about it. She and Daniel had their radios, after all. She followed the two smaller Unas out of that building and into a cold wind that had sprung up. She hastily pulled on Daniel's uniform jacket, which she'd been carrying along with her gear, and slipped her arms through her rucksack's straps.

The building the Unas led her to wasn't far away. It was in much worse shape than the first she'd been in; the roof had collapsed, dirt drifted around the rubble blocking the floor, and the air stank of mildew. But a path had been cleared through the debris, and she followed the Unas into the musty darkness.

Did Unas see in the dark? Daniel had said they liked to live in caves. But he'd also said they used fire, and lit their caves and cooked their food. So shouldn't they take a torch down into these dark ruins? Well, they didn't have a torch, so Pat turned on her P-90's light and shone it around in the ruin.

That startled the Unas. One said something to the other in their guttural language, then they both leaned over her light, held their hands close to it, and exclaimed. They had probably never seen light without heat before.

Once they got over their excitement, Pat was able to shine the light through the ruins. This building had been even bigger than the one with all the symbols on the walls, but something had crushed the glassy black material of the roof in, as if a giant had stepped on it and broken it. She didn't see any sign of symbols on the walls, so she followed the two Unas along the path through the debris. It led down a flight of broad, shallow stairs, made of the same glassy black stuff.

The odor of something rotting intensified as Pat descended. Did some animal lair down there? If so, why were the Unas bringing her here? She swung her light along the black walls and steps, but didn't see anything disgusting, just mud--or what she hoped was just mud. A cold, damp breeze came up the stairs, wafting the smell of mold and rot into her face until she nearly gagged.

At the bottom of the stairs, they came into an underground room so large her light only illuminated the part of it closest to her. The little she saw was bad enough. What had this room been, and how long ago? Folds of something--hangings? banners?--hung from points on the high ceiling nearly to the floor. The draft of her passage with the Unas stirred the stiff, grimy folds and intensified the stench of rot. She swallowed and thought of a Halloween haunted house draped with fake cobwebs and spray-painted cloth. But here the nastiness was not faked.

The Unas trotted between the disgusting hangings, following the path through the debris, and after her first look around Pat kept her light resolutely on the path, not wanting to see anything else in the big underground room. She listened uneasily for noises that might signal unsavory inhabitants out there ready to pounce. Rustles around and above her brought to mind the rats that had chewed through her bonds when she'd first got here--and then she firmly reminded herself, _This is __not__ real._

Once again Pat wondered if _Whoever_ was now reading her thoughts, not just acting on her spoken words. Had the rustles begun because she expected them? Would they become squamous horrors if she pictured the minions of Cthulhu, or giant spiders like Shelob from _The Lord of the Rings_? She firmly reined in her imagination, concentrating on following the Unas.

Their trek through the smelly dark took much longer than Pat expected, even in this big a building, but finally they reached the back of the underground room. She shone her light along the wall, noting a long line of shadowed recesses--doorways? She knew Daniel would want to see this. He probably wouldn't be fazed by the smell and the unseen rustlings.

The two Unas beckoned to her eagerly, and disappeared into the darkness through one of the doorways. She followed warily, her P-90 at the ready.

"Oh, my god." Pat stopped in the doorway, mouth agape. Her light illuminated gleaming reds, blues, greens--rainbows of opalescence. The small room was filled with a translucent, gelatinous net. In nearly every opening of the net a fist-sized jewel glowed. No, not jewels. They looked just like the worry-stone thing she'd touched to start this whole crazy 'adventure' series.

The Unas seemed very pleased with themselves. They gestured toward the artifacts, and the smallest reached into the net and stroked one of them, just as Pat had stroked the side of the mug. Pat had to restrain herself from yelling "Don't touch that thing!" But nothing happened when the Unas touched it. After all, would it cause an adventure within an adventure?

Daniel might have some ideas about this. In fact, Daniel would be wild to see this!

The Unas were looking at her, heads tilted to the side. She smiled, and told them, "Yes, this is _exactly_ what I wanted! Well done!" She didn't dare touch one of the things, but she reached toward them, glancing to the Unas to see if they'd let her.

The smallest one hunched its shoulders, but looked up at her as if to say, "Don't abuse the privilege."

"You probably shouldn't have brought me here?" Pat asked. "Okay, I won't touch. But do you mind if I call Daniel on my radio?" She carefully pulled the radio out of her vest pocket. When the Unas showed no signs of alarm, she thumbed it on and said, "Daniel? Can you hear me?"

Pat and the Unas twitched when the radio let out a _blat_ of static. What if _Whoever_ wouldn't let her talk about the artifacts? Well, she could probably talk around it, unless _Whoever_ started choking her. Or maybe there was something in the walls of this building that blocked radio. She ought to go back outside and try again.

She took a last look at the worry-stone things hanging in their translucent net and turned to follow the path back through the dark. The Unas followed her, occasionally saying something she couldn't understand.

Her foot knocked something rattling into the darkness, and hissing sounded all around them. Pat froze, and the Unas made noises that this time sounded more like threatening growls than language.

Whatever hissed in the darkness scuttled away from Pat's light, but she heard it returning behind her whenever she turned the light away. "Why can't it ever be simple?" she murmured, swinging the light in a circle.

The two Unas took up stances flanking her. She wished she could talk to them, to ask them what threatened. For it was obvious the Unas thought it a threat.

"Oh, for goodness sake," Pat said. She had a rifle! It wasn't just an expensive flashlight. She caught one of the Unas by the arm, indicated her rifle, and covered her ears. The Unas didn't seem to understand. She repeated the gesture with the other Unas, who hunched shoulders and looked apprehensive.

"Hope they don't get scared and go after _me_ with those impressive claws," Pat muttered. She squeezed the trigger and sprayed bullets into the darkness among the stinking hangings.

The Unas crouched, covering their ears, as bullets whined and ricocheted through the hall. Then Pat covered _her_ ears as hideous screams scaled up into supersonic, raising the hair on her arms and neck. Thumps, whines, and the intensifying of the stench told her the bullets had some effect.

She didn't stick around to see if she'd killed anything. She grabbed an arm of each Unas, yanked them to their feet, and ran for the stairs.

_Shit_. Things converged from all sides now, rustling and moaning.


	8. Chapter 8: Stones

This is it, folks. I hope you've enjoyed the long weekend with Pat and Daniel. I'd appreciate knowing what you think!

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Section 8: Stones

Pat couldn't run and aim her gun at the creatures following her at the same time, so decided running was the best idea. Her light bobbed in crazy arcs across the underground room as she dashed along the path through the debris. Though she caught brief glimpses of things moving in the darkness, she couldn't tell what they were.

She leapt for the stairs and headed upward, slipping a few times in the noxious goo that covered the treads. The Unas could probably have run faster than she, and passed her on the wide stairs, but seemed to think they needed to stay with her.

Wintry sunlight leaking through the destroyed roof had never been so welcome. Pat pounded out of the building, followed by the two Unas, and stood gasping the cold, clean air into her lungs. The Unas were panting too, and one said, slowly, to Pat, "A ka!"

She, of course, still didn't understand. When she got back to the SGC, maybe she could study the Unas language. She was rather intrigued by the aliens. But would real Unas behave like these, or were their reactions colored by the way Daniel wanted Unas to act? She shrugged, and the Unas did too.

Still breathing heard, Pat keyed her radio. "Daniel? You _really_ want to see this."

This time Daniel's voice came over the radio, sounding flustered. "Pat! Where have you been? You weren't there when I went back, and I was . . . worried." Pat thought he was going to say something else before he came up with 'worried.' 'Anxious' maybe? Or 'frantic'?

"Sorry. The Unas who helped me were showing me something, and--well, you just have to _see_ it." She couldn't come out and say that she'd found things that looked like the artifact which, she thought, had started these 'adventures'.

"Better than the symbols on the walls?"

"Oh, yes."

"I'll be right there." There was a pause, then the radio beeped again. "Uh, where _are_ you?"

She gave him directions, and moments later Daniel, trailed by a group of Unas, trotted over. "Are you all right?" he said, his gaze traveling up and down her body, his brow wrinkled with worry.

His intent, worried gaze made something flutter behind her breastbone. _Even if __this__ isn't real, he's honestly concerned about me._ She gave him a rather wavery smile, suddenly feeling ridiculously emotional. _Must be all the blood I lost_, she thought. "Really, I'm fine. But you need to see this."

Briefly she described what the Unas had showed her, rather surprised that she could talk about the stones without choking. "But I'm warning you, there are some kind of nasty critters down there. Even the Unas were anxious."

"You're willing to go in there again?" His apprehensive look hadn't changed, even with the prospect of an exciting archaeological find.

Pat closed her eyes. _I'm falling for this man hard_, she thought. _And it will all be different when we get out of here._ She swallowed, so that her voice wouldn't shake, and said, "Hey, there's two of us now; two flashlights, two weapons. No worry."

The smile he flashed her was completely worth it. "I'll make an archaeologist of you yet, Pat," he said.

"An archaeologist who carries a rifle," she muttered under her breath, but he heard it.

"I've been doing _that_ for years." He shrugged. "Maybe more often than your average archaeologist. . . ."

She had to grin. The pothunters the SGC had to deal with were not just peasants out for a little extra money. Dealing with aliens masquerading as gods, creatures who weren't human, things that didn't even have corporeal bodies--yes, it had been a long time since he was _just_ an archaeologist.

"Um, can you explain to the Unas that we want to go back down? These two were happy to show the stone thingies to me, but didn't want me to touch them. They might not want us going down again--especially since we stirred up whatever lives down there."

Daniel turned to the Unas and started explaining to them, with words in their language and plenty of gestures, what he wanted to do. From the growls he got back, and the facial expressions of the Unas warriors he was talking to, they didn't want to let him. The smaller Unas who had led her to this building seemed to be getting yelled at, and were doing a bit of yelling back.

"The warriors are upset with the women," Daniel explained quietly to Pat. "I think they're saying they shouldn't have brought you here."

"You really do want to see those things," she repeated. Maybe when he saw them he'd realize they were in another of those stupid adventures. With that thought Pat could have kicked herself. She kept forgetting she could influence this adventure. She thought, _They'll let us both see the room downstairs, they'll take us down there_, and told Daniel, "Tell them we won't take anything. We just want pictures, like you've been doing before, and to touch the stones." She added the last because she wanted to see what would happen if, while they were already in an adventure, they touched the things that _caused_ the adventures. Maybe nothing. Maybe they'd end up in a different adventure. Either way, unless the different adventure was _really_ nasty, there shouldn't be a problem. She hoped.

Suddenly the Unas agreed with Daniel--or so she guessed, as they all streamed into the building, and Daniel beckoned her to follow. Her 'suggestion' had worked.

She turned her light on as soon as they got into the building, even though light filtered through the broken roof. Maybe some of the creatures--whatever they had been--had followed her and the two female Unas up the stairs. She shone the light over drifted dirt, sickly attenuated vegetation growing with little light, and half-buried rubble, but saw nothing moving. The smell of rot had intensified, perhaps because ten people moved through the ruin now, rather than just three.

"Watch the steps, they're slippery," she called in a low voice to Daniel, just ahead of her. The female Unas followed close behind her, acting much more apprehensive than they had when they came this way before. "And you'd better have your rifle out, not your camera."

Daniel looked back at her, raised his eyebrows, and stowed his camera back in its case on his belt. Unclipping his P-90, he turned on its light and shone it down the stairs, highlighting the stinking ooze.

Ahead, from where the warrior Unas led the way down the stairs, came a high-pitched screech. The Unas stopped, spreading out on the broad stairs in two rows, three abreast, and shaking their spears.

Both Daniel and Pat shone their lights into the darkness of the underground room, but Pat was still too high up the stairs to see anything. "Can you see?" she whispered, and Daniel shook his head.

The Unas loped down the rest of the stairs, their spears poised. Scraping and slithering came from the darkness, and the stench of rot nearly overwhelmed the watchers on the steps above.

"Slowly," Daniel whispered, and started down the last few stairs. His light swept across the underground room like a searchlight through a volcanic ash fall; the rotting hangings had been torn to shreds. Pat coughed; both the smell and the dust were thick and disgusting. She covered her mouth and nose with her left sleeve, holding her rifle rather unsteadily in her right hand.

She could see nothing in the beams of their lights but the tatters of hangings drifting down like filthy moths. Out of the darkness came a coughing grunt, then another of those supersonic screams that pierced through Pat's head like a needle.

The Unas came tearing back through the darkness toward them, and Pat rushed down the last few steps to stand next to Daniel, braced her rifle against her shoulder, and aimed out into the darkness. The beam of her light showed, about fifty feet away, what might be a head sprouting hundreds of writhing wormy tentacles, each with a hissing mouth. _Yep, it's a squamous horror. Why can't I keep my imagination to myself?_

"Let's hope that thing's not like a hydra, that sprouts more heads each time you chop one off," Daniel muttered, and Pat winced. _Don't give __Whoever__ more ideas than __I__ already did,_ she thought.

"Get ready to run back up the stairs," he said, and repeated it--she assumed--in Unas for the rest of the party. Then he opened fire at the thing slithering toward them, all its wormy heads dripping foul-smelling slime.

Pat added her gunfire to his, sweeping the P-90's fire across the creature until her clip ran out. The Unas howled and grunted, shaking their spears, and the thing collapsed about ten feet away, its supersonic scream fading to nothing.

"That's killed it," Pat stated, not wanting _Whoever_ to get any ideas otherwise. She quickly replaced the clip in her rifle, for in case the thing had family back in the darkness somewhere. After a moment, Daniel did the same.

The Unas were jumping and hooting in a victory dance, as if they'd killed the creature themselves. But under all their noise, Pat could hear rustling among the foul-smelling remnants of the hangings. "I think there's still something out there," she told Daniel.

"Yeah, I hear it too," he said. They moved back to back, each swinging a light over half of the cavernous space. Things like furry crabs, each easily as long as Pat's forearm, scuttled out of the darkness to begin tearing, with chitinous pincers, at the dead squamous horror.

"Eew!" she said, but since they didn't seem interested in anything but the putrid carcass, she held her fire.

"Quick, while they're busy eating that thing we killed, let's go see what you found," Daniel said, right against her ear.

She turned to see him gazing quizzically at her through the haze of floating dust motes. He opened his mouth to say something else, but seemed unable to do it. He put his hands to his throat, and then his eyes widened behind his glasses. _He's just now figured out that we're in an adventure_, she thought, _and this isn't real._

Daniel's mouth hardened into a thin line, and his shoulders slumped. How disappointing that all his research here was useless, not real, a figment of someone's imagination--probably his own. Even so, that didn't mean they couldn't learn something about those worry-stone things. Pat grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the doorways at the back of the underground room. "Come on. You _really_ want to see this."

He blinked at her, resisting her pull for a moment, his face set and angry. "Daniel, I'm serious," she said, staring him straight in the face. "I don't care what's going on back here, you want to see this." Would he understand from this that she knew it was an adventure, but still thought he would be interested?

He took a deep breath, holding her gaze, then relaxed, letting her lead him. She smiled and nodded, earning another of his quizzical looks. They left the celebrating Unas behind, and hurried along the path cleared in the noxious rubble.

Pat was glad there was a path, for all the gaping doorways in the back of the cavernous room looked alike. She ignored the things that skittered out of the beam of the light she swept ahead of them, then stepped back when they got to the mouth of the room she sought. Shining the light through the doorway, she gestured, with the hand not holding her rifle, for Daniel to go in ahead of her.

He stepped in and gasped. "My God! I understand why you wanted me to see this!" He moved his P-90 around, highlighting the jewel-toned stones in their translucent, gelatinous web. "Did you touch any of them?" He turned, and his light almost blinded her. "Sorry," he said, shining it down on the floor.

"The female Unas wouldn't let me. But none of the Unas are here right now. . . ." She didn't dare say anything more.

"Umm." Daniel aimed the light into the room again. "Maybe if we touch one together, at the same time?" He turned and met her eyes, his face stained with colored reflections from the stones. His expression was full of what he couldn't say--speculation, excitement, and some concern.

She tried to tell him, with her own expression, that she understood. "What color?" she asked.

Now his face was tense with thinking. She didn't think they'd want to touch another blue stone--that was what, probably, had started this whole series of 'adventures.' But the rest were unknown. How to even guess which one to choose? She'd have to trust his scientific guesswork.

"That one." Daniel pointed, with flashlight and left hand, at the one stone in the net that had no color--or all colors. Its surface glowed with pale opalescence, traces of colors not quite those formed of the red/yellow/blue sequence she was familiar with. Looking more closely at it, she could also see that it was in the exact center of the net--halfway into the room, halfway between floor and ceiling. To reach it they would have to step in, come into contact with that oddly gelatinous network.

Pat clipped her P-90 onto the front of her vest, then met Daniel's gaze once more, nodded, and they both stepped into the room. The net stretched and was not at all sticky. The stones hummed as they swung away from the humans--protected, by the net, from touching each other or Pat or Daniel.

Pat shook her head and clutched at the P-90 on her chest. The stones' humming seemed to speak to her, tiny voices in her head telling her incomprehensible stories. She shook her head and continued slowly forward, noticing that Daniel, too, shook his head. He must hear it too.

She turned slightly when she saw a flash of light at the edge of her vision--or had it been movement? Perhaps the Unas had followed them to the room and were coming in after them, not wanting them to take their treasure. She glanced left and right, seeing more movement, but they were just flashes. She blinked, then decided to ignore them.

The air in the little room was stuffy, with an odd smell, but not the nauseating moldy smell of the outer room. The net restricted her movements, and she had a sudden flash of panic that it would trap her and she would hang there like a fly in a spiderweb until she died of hunger and thirst. _This isn't real_, she told herself, but if _Whoever_ let her die like that to end the 'adventure,' it wouldn't be a pleasant death.

Daniel's expression was one of intense concentration, and he looked nowhere but at the one opalescent stone in the center of the room. Slowly, wasting no effort on thrashing, he pushed his way through the clinging network. Pat followed his example, quashing her panic.

They attained the center of the room, entirely surrounded by the clinging, rubbery strands of the net, the jewel-bright stones hanging all about them whispering in dizzying harmony. Pat met Daniel's eyes, and together they reached toward the central stone.

"Thank you, storytellers." A rich, smooth voice filled the room--or was it only inside Pat's head? The stone warmed under her fingers, and colors chased across it. "Is your story complete now, or do you wish to continue?"

Pat's mouth dropped open in shock--and she quickly shut it when she realized what a cliché that was. She swallowed and whispered, "Daniel?"

Daniel cleared his throat and said, "Um, can you tell me about the stories?"

The warm, rich voice--was this _Whoever_?--ran through Pat's head. "My purpose is to give information to both the storyteller and those who experience the stories."

Daniel began, "But--"

Cutting him off, Pat blurted, "We're both telling _and_ experiencing the stories. Is that supposed to happen?" She had the hand which was not touching the stone raised halfway to her throat, expecting to choke, and was amazed when she could actually say it.

There was a long pause, and then the warm voice, neither masculine nor feminine but with elements of both, said, "Please give an example of the problem you have experienced."

Taking it in turns, Pat and Daniel told how they had found themselves in experiences they thought were real, how they had felt pain, hunger, and cold. Pat explained how she had realized that killing themselves in the 'adventure' might release them from it, but then they'd found themselves almost immediately in another.

As they talked, Pat felt an odd sensation, like buzzing, inside her head. The stone's 'voice' in 'thinking' mode? Or was it reading their minds, acquainting itself with how their experiences had really felt to them? She wasn't sure she wanted some alien stone reading her mind, but if it would end these 'adventures' she was willing for it to happen.

She watched Daniel as he described what he had felt; his face shone with scientific curiosity, and a half smile dented his cheeks with the barest hint of dimples. Almost she could hope the 'adventures' continued, if they'd keep her with him. Once they were back at the SGC, she would go back to her team and he to his. The only time they'd meet would be in the chow hall, or if she loitered in the corridor outside his lab hoping to run into him there.

The warm, rich voice said, "It is understood. The story collection was built for others, like but unlike you, and the storytelling process became more intimate for you than for the storytellers who went before. Perhaps that is what makes your stories so exceedingly rich, creative, and interesting." The words were becoming harder to hear, softer, attenuated as if with distance.

"Though your stories are valued, it is perhaps best. . . ."

#

Pat gave a huge gasp and straightened up in Daniel's desk chair. She looked around, taking in details of his office--desk strewn with papers and interesting objects, boxes of artifacts, clutter on shelves and chairs. This was real--wasn't it? The rich voice of _Whoever_ had faded, and now she was here.

Daniel, in the chair facing her, sat up, holding the fragments of the stone Pat had dropped. They both stared down at the shiny blue pieces for a long time. Pat noted absently that the opalescence went straight through.

"Was that stone what made us live those adventures, then?" she asked, breaking the extended silence.

Daniel frowned, staring at the fragments in his hand. "No, I don't think so. I think the stones are a . . . a matrix, a place to store the information that something else gets from our minds. The question is. . . ." He dropped the fragments into his other hand, his brow furrowed in thought. "The question is, _what_ was obtaining the information from us? It has to be one of the artifacts we brought back from P3R-118." He looked up, his abstracted gaze running over the boxes piled against the wall.

"It took us days after we touched that stone before we had the first 'adventure.' But then when I touched it again, we were in the story instantly. Any ideas?"

Daniel cocked his head, thinking. "The . . . the _voice_ said that we were unlike the people this was made for. Maybe it took that long to . . . to interface with our brains. That's something else Sam and I can figure out."

A sense of loss washed through Pat like acid. She had worked so well with Daniel in the 'adventure,' but now that it was over she would go back to her team and Daniel would be 'Dr. Jackson' of SG-1 once again. Once Daniel put his head together with Major Carter and figured it all out, she might hear--in passing--about how SG-1 had made an exciting new discovery on another planet. But she had no 'need to know,' so why would anyone look her up to tell her about it?

She looked down at her hands, noticed they were trembling, and bit her lip. _Settle down, Yancy_, she told herself. _You knew it would end, you knew it wasn't real._

"Hey, Pat!" Daniel's voice was bemused. He held up his left arm, shaking his watch in front of her face. "It's 2:00 in the afternoon--_Sunday_ afternoon. I think my stomach is eating its own lining. Let's go to the cafeteria and talk about this there."

Startled, she looked up at him. He flashed her a smile and reached out a hand to help her from the chair. The warmth that ran through her from his grip did much to counteract the earlier feelings of hopelessness and loss.

Daniel pulled her to her feet, and for a moment they stood very close. Pat's mouth went dry as he stared into her face. His eyes were bright blue, and a confused look creased his brow. "Pat?" he said uncertainly.

She gulped. "Daniel?"

He was still holding her hand. "You . . . we worked together well, even if that wasn't . . . real. I . . . um . . . I'd like it if you would continue working on this problem with me. I think I can get General Hammond to agree."

He continued very quickly, as if he was trying to get words out so fast they fell over each other. "You've _lived_ it with me, and no one--not even Sam--has that advantage. We understand it--and each other--and I'd like you to. . . ." He stalled out there, and stood staring at her, shaking his head a little as if he didn't know what to say next.

A rather wavery grin bloomed on Pat's face. Daniel, the great Dr. Jackson of SG-1, was acting like a teenager asking for his first date. "You should know I'd love it--working with you on this, I mean." _Now who's bumbling along like a lovesick teenager?_ "Do you know what I'd really like to do, after we finish that research?"

"What?" Still holding her hand, he led her toward the door.

"I'd like you to teach me Unas, and go meet some real ones."

He turned back toward her, and this time his smile was neither bemused nor uncertain. "I can do that." He squeezed the hand he was holding, a warm pressure of his long fingers. "Yes, I think we can do that together."

As they threaded their way around scientists and airmen in the corridor, and chatted about translations, libraries, and Unas, Pat realized she hadn't even combed her hair for two days. It felt more like two weeks. She glanced sideways at Daniel, and he met her gaze with another of those dazzling smiles. Well, if he didn't care, neither did she.

It had been a long weekend--the longest she'd ever experienced--but she rather thought it had been worth all the pain and fear. Without the 'adventures' she never might have realized what an affinity she had for archaeology--and a certain archaeologist.

END


End file.
